Book Review Essay: Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis by Warren S. Poland. New York: Routledge, 2017. 206 pp.

“Psychoanalysis has its own hard problem… . It is the challenge to integrate the phenomena of human separateness and commonality… .How well can anyone keep in mind separateness and unified human experience all at once.” —Poland 2017, p. 4

“Writing is my way of trying to understand… .This mirrors how I work, or try to work, in practice, always an inquiry to try to find whatever meaning lies behind what has unfolded.” —Poland 2017, p. 5

A prolific and widely read contributor to the psychoanalytic literature for nearly a half century, Warren Poland has been one of the most thoughtful, articulate, and creative presences on the psychoanalytic scene. Writing in a clear, engaging, and literate style that consistently draws the reader into an intimate dialogue with an ever-active mind, a new collection of Poland’s collected papers from 2000 to the present is a gift to colleagues and an invitation to consider and reconsider what we think we understand. Although I had read many of these papers when they first appeared in journals, the opportunity to read the entire

collection as a whole deepened my understanding and appreciation of Poland’s distinctive contributions. Even readers with views most discordant with his main themes and preoccupations would likely find themselves in enriching conversation with Poland and with some of the ideas explored in these twenty essays. I use the term “essays” here advisedly, since that word captures something of the curious, searching, at times playful, and emotionally resonant qualities of Poland’s prose.

Poland’s voice in these essays is essentially a conservative one—a term that often carries negative connotations, but is meant here in a more positive sense of conserving what is useful and generative from the past, while discoursing with curren