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A Review of Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self: The Inner World, the Intimate World, and the World of Culture and Society, by Paul Wachtel (2014), Routledge, New York, 262 words.
I recently attended a Carnegie Hall recital given by Maurizio Pollini, a concert pianist and one of my longtime favorites. Pollini, a septuagenarian born in Milan, Italy, made his Carnegie Hall debut nearly 50 years ago. Because he had canceled two prior New York City engagements due to an unspecified illness, I held my breath when Pollini, who has been called “the dean of living pianists” (Herbst, 2014), took his seat at the keyboard and began to play. To my delight, I found his performance masterful. I was pleased to learn afterward that my relatively uneducated ear led me to an assessment similar to that of New York Times reviewer Anthony Tommasini (2015), who described Pollini’s performance as an instance of “consummate musicianship and pianism.”
Lost in reverie during Pollini’s virtuosic performance, I found my associations drifting in many directions, including to Paul Wachtel and his most recent book, which I was rereading at the time. As with Pollini, we have come to expect a great deal of Wachtel. And like Pollini, Wachtel again does not disappoint. His latest book, Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self: The Inner World, the Intimate World, and the World of Culture and Society, is a wonderful, thought-provoking compilation of strong, previously published essays that the author has specifically reworked for this edition.
Wachtel believes that, to our detriment, the pervasive and highly significant role of context has been terribly neglected by psychoanalytic theorists, who often “render society but a distant shadow or ghostly epiphenomenon, simply the elaboration of patterns that have already been well set before the child begins elementary school” (p. 193). In this book, he seeks to correct that error. From
multiple perspectives, he elaborates the pervasive i