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The title of Richard Chessick's new book poses a fascinating question for the psychotherapist concerned with better understanding the foundations of the therapeutic enterprise, and, given Chessick's clinical and intellectual distinction, one looks forward to a stimulating discussion. Regrettably, the book itself does little to answer the question and much to confuse the reader about its actual topic, the thinking of several important 20th-century European philosophers and psychoanalysts. Undoubtedly, some of the blame for this state of affairs lies with the publisher; while it is evident that Chessick commands a great deal of information about the philosophers he discusses, he fails to bring it together in clear expository form. This is a problem that could have been corrected by a competent editor, but the book shows little evidence of serious editing.
The book consists of chapters on Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics (which includes a discussion of Hans-Georg Gadamer), Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, R. D. Laing, Georg Lukács and Jan Patocka, Heinz Kohut, and Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The book concludes with an Epilogue which, rather than tie together what has gone before, becomes a personal meditation on human aggression.
Chessick's chapters on Lukács, Patocka, and Kohut are by far the best, and show what might have been hoped for in the rest of the book, largely because they tell a coherent story about the development of a line of thought. But the book as a whole lacks organization: A chapter on Heidegger is followed by a chapter on Foucault, who, although he owes a great deal to Heidegger is really only intelligible within the frame of contemporary French thought established by, among others, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan,