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This is an unusual book with two explicit and very different aims. Rudnytsky, a professor of English, set out to examine that line of theorists within psychoanalysis whose writings constitute “the most promising elaboration of Freud's theory” (p. 149). That was his scholarly aim. This book, however, also reflects a highly personal
journey into psychoanalysis that the author began with a study of Freud and Oedipus in 1987. He makes it clear that he has found in analysis a way of thinking that imbues his own life with a meaning that he describes as spiritual, despite his being nonreligious. Part of that self-identified “transferential relation” to psychoanalysis has been a wish to find an idealizable theoretical hero in whose life and work the author might solidly ground this relation.
This is a unique and valuable book. The author openly admits to a motivation for his attachment to analysis and his desire to write about it that, I suspect, infiltrates the ambitions of many analytic authors. He wants to root his life in a meaning system. He also wants a specific idealized object with whom to establish an ongoing intersubjective dialogue, an object with whom to establish an ongoing intersubjective dialogue, an object that embodies the new possibilities for a psychoanalytic vision of life that, in the author's view, have been opened up by the “displacement of the father by the mother” as the principal focus of developmental attention and the concomitant “subordination of triangular issues of sexual conflict to dyadic ones” (p. xi).
This openly pursued personal and scholarly agenda adds an element of passion to Rudnytsky's writing that I found refreshing. He once idealized Freud and the Oedipus myth. Then he became disenchanted. He turned to Jacques Lacan but found Lacan's linguistic postmodernism to be ultimately unsatisfying. A significant part of his inability to idealize Lacan lay in the author's commitment to biology as “a primary variable in human experience, and h