Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry. By Howard B. Levine. London:  Routledge, 2021.

• What makes an analyst, when he leaves to go on holiday, tell his patient where he is going?

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• What makes the analyst, when asked by a patient about his eye colour, answer that his eyes are brown, but when he was a child, his mother told him they were hazel?

• What makes an analyst, on hearing from his patient that nobody ever read to her when she was a child, ask whether she had read Li’l Abner and if she knew about the book’s shmoo characters?

It is possible (albeit unlikely) that, when faced with these statements, another psychoanalyst could imagine they came from a colleague with deficiencies in his analytic function. It could seem as though he were seductively avoiding frustrating his patient (item one), showing off about where he was going on holiday or his nice eyes (items one and two), or even interrupting the associations of his patient with stories from his own life (item three).

The questions raised relate to Howard B. Levine’s description of work with his patient Ellen, which he recounts in Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry. As we shall see, this supposed critic is mistaken.

Howard Levine is an author who is recognized for his contributions to psychoanalytic thought in various areas, notably for his texts on primitive mental states. He is also known for his generous works in which he disseminates the thinking of major North American, European, and Latin American authors.1

In this book, Levine returns to his creative ideas about processes of representation and focuses on clinical challenges faced by contemporary analysts in the treatment of non-neurotic patients. Patients who, historically, would have been contraindicated for psychoanalytic treatment.

Levine offers us personal contributions which, starting with Freud, expand upon the thinking of other authors who have dedicated