You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Last year I had the opportunity to hear Deborah Luepnitz present a paper comparing her two personal analyses—the first in the object-relations tradition and the second in the Lacanian. In describing the healing effects of her second analyst's clear and beautiful use of language, Luepnitz commented, “Freud said famously that psychoanalysis is a cure through love; perhaps it is also a cure through beauty.” Reading her beautifully crafted Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas has convinced me that she is on to something important.
The book's title comes from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's parable about the porcupines who jostle perpetually between painful commingling with each other and chilly isolation on their own. Freud (1920/1959) picked up on this fable in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, suggesting that it portrayed well the tragicomic troubles human beings face with intimacy. During an initial consultation with a patient years ago, Luepnitz recounted the fable. “It's soothing,” replied the woman who had always viewed her romantic ups and downs as shameful. The book is filled with such moments, in which therapist Luepnitz either finds the simple but dead-on turn of phrase to make a difference with a patient, or writes a brilliant aside to us, her readers. The author wears her learning lightly. She is clearly at home with the classics; references to Darwin, Byron, Dickinson, the Bible, and the Talmud abound. But so do references to contemporary authors such as Doris Lessing and Jamaica Kincaid as well as retro pop-culture items like Rod Serling's Night Gallery.
This level of erudition and style within psychoanalytic writing probably finds its match only in the work of Adam Phillips (1993, 1994). But Phillips is timid in comparison—never daring to reveal more than a few sentences at a time about his clinical practice. And whereas Phillips is versed only in the British school, Luepnitz has trained in both the British and French tr