A Safe Place for Serious Play: A Review of Psychoanalytic Intersections: Selected Writing of the Austen Riggs Center Erikson Institute Visiting Scholar Program: Psychoanalytic Intersections: Selected Writing of the Austen Riggs Center Erikson Institute Visiting Scholar Program edited by Elise Miller (2024),  Routledge, New York,  274 pages.

At the time of this writing, the second Trump administration had concluded its fourth week. It is a dark and head-spinning time if one values—in no particular order—the rule of law, science, civil rights, academic freedom, social justice, tenderness, decency, and mercy—if, moreover, one believes that any human’s well-being depends on the well-being of the world in which one lives. Raw, brute power (a burgeoning oligarchy), chaos, and revenge seem to be the orders of the day. When I read that President Trump had rescinded Anthony Fauci’s much needed and federally funded security detail, my first thought is, “I hope Michael Bloomberg offers to pay for it, so Dr. Fauci isn’t murdered by one of those recently released January 6 convicts.” How sad that my mind turns to hoped-for benevolence by one of our “better” billionaires.

Such is the macro-context in which I write about Psychoanalytic Intersections: Selected Writing of the Austen Riggs Center Erikson Institute Visiting Scholar Program, edited by Elise Miller, a collection of 12 pieces of writing by writers and thinkers who “had something to say about what it means to apply psychoanalytic concepts to other fields” (Miller, 2024, p. 9).

The Austen Riggs Center is a private, residential hospital located in the Berkshires, where “quite troubled” patients (Miller, 2024, p. xxiii) receive “intensive, psychoanalytic treatment” (Miller, 2024, p. xxviii). It is an open

therapeutic setting in which patients and staff engage in a breadth of activities together, including the fine arts, theater arts, and gardening; Austen Riggs “feels more like a college campus than a psychiatric hospital,” according to its literature. To be sure, one could easily confuse Austen Riggs’s Web site for the Web sites of nearby Amherst College or Smith College: photos