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Barbara Ann Schapiro's work focuses on the “relational paradigm” in psychoanalytic theory as it relates to literary texts, particularly novels. The opening chapter offers an introduction to the theory of the relational model, and the chapters following generally focus on a single author and a single narrative—Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Ann Beattie and Alice Hoffman. Applying “psychoanalytic relational-model theories” to this wide range of classical, modern and contemporary works is a useful and illuminating enterprise, and Professor Schapiro, who teaches literature at Rhode Island College, is a clear writer whose essays, like a good conversation, are a pleasure to engage.
The opening chapter gives the reader a brief history of object relations theory, beginning with Melanie Klein, and focuses mostly on the ideas of “relational-model theories” as articulated by Stephen Mitchell. The chapter also focuses on the related feminist psychoanalytic work of Chodorow, Gilligan, and Jessica Benjamin. The emphasis, then, is on preoedipal dynamics and the relationship of mother and child. In this emphasis interest in language is shunted aside—“Affective attunement precedes linguistic development,” Schapiro notes in her brief quarrel with “Lacan's view of the primacy of language in the construction of subjectivity” (p. 22). The goal of her work Schapiro puts in the words of George Atwood and Robert Stolorow, “The illumination of the inner pattern of a life, that distinctive structure of meanings that connects the different parts of an individual's world into an intelligible whole” (p. 24). In addition to down playing language, Schapiro's focus on preoedipal relations theory also seems to preclude interest in drives. As Schapiro notes at one point, “Human