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Herbert Rosenfeld, who passed away in 1986 at the age of seventy-six, can rightly be regarded as one of the most significant analysts in contemporary psychoanalysis. Robert Hinshelwood’s volume dedicated to
Rosenfeld is a dense, carefully crafted text that retraces his entire clinical and theoretical trajectory, following the development of Rosenfeld’s thought from his first contributions in 1947 through to his posthumously published work, Impasse and Interpretation .
Hinshelwood offers a faithful reconstruction of the fundamental concepts that accompanied Rosenfeld over more than forty years of work and a critical map capable of restoring the distinctive feature of Rosenfeld: that of an analyst who, while declaring himself above all a clinician, was able to move beyond mere technique, deepening and transforming some central psychoanalytic constructs. For example, his insights into destructive narcissism, which remain to this day an indispensable key to understanding many clinical situations.
In addition to retracing Rosenfeld’s trajectory, this meticulously articulated book also prompts the reader to engage in a personal movement of reflection, opening the way to further questions and developments. It is in this sense that—while remaining faithful to the style and content of the work under review—I feel compelled to include some personal considerations about Rosenfeld’s contribution, which are informed by my direct experience of his Italian seminars, whose English edition I had the opportunity to edit in 2001.1
The first section of this book is devoted to Rosenfeld’s pioneering work with psychotic patients, collected in Psychotic States.2 It is important to recall that Rosenfeld, together with Bion and Hanna Segal, stands as one of the key figures of the Kleinian group who succeeded in translating into clinical practice the theoretical premises set forth by Melanie Klein in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.3 Among the three, Rosenfeld was undoubtedly the most syst