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Alan Bass is a first-rate thinker, consummate scholar, and creative author. I was introduced to his scholarship in the process of writing about concrete thinking (Tuch, 2011), which led me to read his seminal article on the subject (Bass, 1997)—in which he introduces the idea that resistance needn't universally arise from the threatened prospect of the emergence of intolerable psychic content that has been relegated to the dynamic unconscious but, rather, might represent a collision between the analyst's abstract/symbolic ways of thinking and the patient's more concrete form of cognition, which leaves no space for the concept that one thing may represent another, that x is not always or only x. Bass wrote about one such patient who characterized this collision, who cried out, “I don't like this. It feels like trees flying in the air” (p. 667). In this volume, Bass extends his thinking about concrete thinking through its connection with fetishism, which is a form of concrete thinking insofar as it represents a failure to note that the fetish symbolically represents something else—in Freud's thinking, something that was missing (the woman's penis); the fetishistic object is seen as “the thing itself” and not a substitute for, or symbol of, something else.
Bass's book is about fetishistic objects in the broadest sense—those that get worshiped, those seen functioning sexually, and those that constitute, in Marx's thinking, the fetishization of commodities. Bass is a serious philosopher who serves on the graduate philosophy faculty of the New School for Social Research, and his impressive erudition makes this book something akin to a doctoral thesis. For those anticipating that this training and supervising analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Institute will launch into a clinically oriented discussion of the topic, those hopes will largely be dashed, for this is—first and foremost—a highly theoretic text that greatly expands and informs our field's most basic assumptions