Freud and the Spoken Word: Speech as a Key to the Unconscious. By Ana-María Rizzuto. London/New York:  Routledge, 2015.  196 pp.

This book is first and predominantly a report on its author, Ana-María Rizzuto, in her ongoing dialogue with Freud. That it is a dialogue of this kind is her own description, and this has been the case in a number of her previous works, which span several decades.1 Freud and the Spoken Word and this continuing dialogue are in the tradition of hermeneutics. I mean this not primarily in the modern philosophical sense in relation to a theory of textual and other forms of interpretation, but in its original sense—pertaining to the tradition dating back many centuries of commentaries and dialogical engagements by authors with important texts of their predecessors, whether sacred, philosophical, scientific, or otherwise.

While this tendency in psychoanalytic literature in relation to the works of Freud has often been the target of criticism, I think the present work offers an effective challenge to such generic doubts in that it contains a vivid, engaging, contemporary dialogue. I should add that the author's approach is one with which I have direct familiarity, having participated as a student in courses and extracurricular discussions with Rizzuto that led to a coauthored paper recounting an early part of her dialogue with Freud, on that occasion involving Freud's lifelong pursuit of the secrets of nature.2