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The meaning of psychoanalysis, the author reflects, has always reached beyond its own confines to the worlds of philosophy, art, and cognitive science. Freud already suggested that a curriculum of psychoanalysis would need to include the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature. All of these fields share their attempt to understand aspects of mankind.
The chapters deal with the specific as well as with the general. The specific of how one listens to a patient is paired with the general of how one listens or relates to the world. The general question of what it means to be fully alive is linked to the specific concern of how psychoanalytic training can best help the prospective analysts to become creatively alive in order to help their patients be more alive as human beings. Winnicott, in discussing the question of what it means to be fully alive, uses the term creative apperception, meaning that when we perceive something, we set it against our experience of the past. This is how we create our own repertoire of meaning.
Among the issues Parsons explores is the question of how and why a person's aliveness can be impaired. He focuses less on defining circumscribed pathology than on markers that tell us whether a person manages to be as fully alive as could be. Thomas Ogden, a contemporary colleague of Winnicott, believes that every form of psychopathology