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I will begin this review with a disclaimer. It is impossible for me to do justice to the range and depth of the excellent analytic writing that Harold Blum brings to bear in this collection of psychoanalytic papers. At the same time, I will do my best to convey some small sense of who Harold Blum was as a person and then make a few comments about the selected papers in this book.
As in the book's introduction, it is worthwhile to speak about Harold Blum as a psychoanalyst and man. Harold P. Blum, M.D., was a giant in the field of psychoanalysis. He died shortly before his 95th birthday on March 27, 2024. Former director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and former editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Blum published nearly 200 scientific papers, wrote or edited 10 books, and taught students and colleagues across four continents. In 1976 he was the inaugural winner of the Margaret Mahler Prize for distinguished contributions to child psychoanalysis, and in 1996 he was one of the inaugural winners of the Sigourney Award, a prestigious award of the psychoanalytic profession. He made significant contributions in advancing psychoanalytic theory, particularly in modernizing the psychoanalytic understanding of female psychology.
Blum was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929 to Jewish immigrant parents who came to the United States from Eastern Europe with little education. He obtained his bachelor's degree at Cornell University and his medical degree from Boston University. He met Elsa Fienberg at Cornell. They married in 1952, and in 1957 they moved to Long Island, where he established his psychoanalytic practice. He wrote his first psychoanalytic paper, “Vincent Van Gogh's Chairs,” before beginning his psychiatric (much less psychoanalytic) training.
Blum acquired extraordinary knowledge of Sigmund Freud and was among the earliest psychoanalysts who added depth to Freud's writing. In addition to his clinical papers, Blum wrote extensively about psycho