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This is a book about polarization in psychoanalysis that is likely to be polarizing, and in ways that reflect perennial divisions in the field. Anderson has previously written about the development of the self, enactment, Shakespeare, concrete thinking, and clinical theory and technique; from her earliest writing, she has used ideas drawn from object relations theory and, in particular, the work of Bion. This book integrates many of her previous interests along with some that reach well beyond psychoanalysis.
Anderson’s book is very ambitious and covers a lot of ground in 146 pages from cover to cover. Her main theme, approached from diverse angles, is that an orientation to the world that privileges representing, predicting, and controlling it – what she calls left-brain thinking—is fundamentally mistaken, and needs to be corrected by shifting towards an opposing orientation – that of the right-brain— which privileges feeling over thinking and intuition over rationality. In eight chapters, Anderson introduces and then fills out ideas about hemispheric specialization, dialectical thinking, personal identity, concreteness, and disavowal. She also explores work on implicit and explicit memory, unconscious fantasy, and hallucinatory phenomena. She looks at the relevance of poetry and metaphor to the structure of the human mind, and discusses some personal experiences in her quest to learn more about the topics of “being” and “becoming,” including her work in an interdisciplinary study group.
The subtitle of the book, Views from Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Metaphysics, states her interdisciplinary sources but also introduces an ambiguity that either supports or undermines her project as a whole, depending on one’s point of view. It is at first unclear why
Anderson would distinguish philosophy and metaphysics as separate subjects. Metaphysics is usually considered to be a part of philosophy, the group of topics gathered together by Aristotle: the natur