Psychoanalytic Cartography: A Review of From Sign to Symbol: Transformational Processes in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Psychology by Joseph Newirth: A Review of From Sign to Symbol: Transformational Processes in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Psychology, Joseph Newirth (2018),  Routledge, New York,  174 pages.

Reading Joseph Newirth’s From Sign to Symbol, Transformational Processes in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Psychology feels a bit like having an engaging conversation with a vastly learned teacher. Newirth’s style feels almost conversational, an informality which belies the breadth of knowledge and scholarly acumen behind his work. In this review of his accessible, rich book, I will emphasize what I feel are his most creative contributions and use my own experience from a first career as a dance/movement therapist working with the memory impaired to demonstrate the applicability of Newirth’s scholarship to extra-analytic realms.

At the heart of the book is the question of how we transform external data and social experiences into meaningful understanding, thoughts, symbols, humor and pleasure in the therapy relationship, as well as what gets in the way of this transformational process in both therapy and supervision. What Newirth brings to this exploration is a unique synthesis of conceptualizations of the transformational process as described by various object relational and postmodern psychoanalytic theorists, as well as theorists in the adjacent disciplines of psychology, including developmental, cognitive and neuropsychology. Newirth references the paradigm shift in multiple disciplines in human sciences from a “view of the mind as a hierarchical system focused on structures of control and the discovery of objective facts, to the present focus on process, how we make meaning from sensory, emotional, kinesthetic, and perceptual bits

of information” (p. 127). Newirth is more interested in recognizing conceptual similarity and overlap than in pointing out the nuanced distinctions between different theories. He brings to his work a lens broad enough to show how the transformational process is essentially the same across disciplin