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Aaron Esman has brought together a rich assortment of papers focused on transference. In addition to the excellence of the individual selections, Esman provides us with a particularly interesting and dynamic perspective demonstrating the vicissitudes of the ongoing discourse concerning this central issue in psychoanalysis.
The individual selections are “classics” and are superb. The contributions are authored by Ferenczi, S. Freud, Strachey, Sterba, Aichhorn, A. Freud, Bibring-Lehner, Greenacre, Zetzel, Greenson, Brenner, Macalpine, Nunberg, Klein, Winnicott, Rioch, Fromm-Reichmann, Stone, Bird, Gill, Stein, Schafer, Loewald, Leites, Kohut, Lacan, Kernberg, and Cooper. I list the contributors to convey some sense of the scope and richness of Esman's book. The experienced student of psychoanalysis will be familiar with most of the papers in this volume, but being “classics,” these papers can be read and reread with considerable benefit and pleasure. In such a review one finds nuances and subtleties that may not have been appreciated during earlier study. Familiar ideas are seen in new ways, and new syntheses are developed as one reexamines familiar concepts. Some of the contributions from earlier periods of metapsychological thinking are valuable in outlining a historic perspective and in establishing a sense of conceptual continuity. Diversity of orientation characterizes the contributions in this volume. This diversity enhances the reader's appreciation of the complexity of the transference phenomenon and vividly underscores the creativity of the thinking in this evolving study.
Esman's balance in his selection of papers is solid and well chosen. Inevitably a particular reader's favorite article will be omitted, and some may question the inclusion of the contributions by Lacan and Fromm-Reichmann in a grouping of papers on transference that are considered “essential.” Nevertheless, the mix is