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Often a writer’s best ideas come out of reading the writing of others, sending them off on tangents beyond the limits of the page and beyond the limits of their prior theoretical thinking. This issue is an attempt to capture some of the energy that comes of one author reading the work of another before that energy is fully metabolized in a new paper or book. All the writers of this issue were asked to respond to a book adjacent to psychoanalysis that they found interesting and record their reactions without feeling the obligation to provide a direct assessment or review. The following are their marginal notations articulated in essay form.
Singer jumps off Cain’s Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, a book devoted to exploring the rarely discussed, complex emotion of bittersweetness. In lovely poetic prose, Singer brings the feeling into vivid experiential life by finding touchstones in his own life.
In The Self: Lost and Found, Magid seeks an understanding of the “self” by bringing Buddhism into dialogue with new enactavist, phenomenological thinking in contemporary philosophy by considering two books side by side. The first is Garfield’s Losing Ourselves. The second is a book by Siderits, Thompson, and Zahavi called Self, No Self: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions. In his passage through these pages, Magid finds the “self” provisionally in an instantiating flow, “constituted by the vicissitudes of relational and physical changes that have taken place over time.”
Civitarese provides a brilliant series of “notes in the margin” of Zahavi’s Husserl’s Legacy. Like Magid, Civitarese sees in the tradition of phenomenology started by Husserl (and reaching a kind of apotheosis in the works of Merleu-Ponty) tremendous relevance to psychoanalysis, in this case bolstering contemporary ideas drawn from Bionian field theory.
Riker pulls from his own experience working at his university with first generation, mostly Latin college stu