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Thirty years ago, I had the good fortune to be taught a course on Freud by Morris Eagle. He was the Roberta Held-Weiss scholar that year at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York, and I was a first-year analytic candidate. I was not new to Freud, having come to psychoanalytic training by way of being an academic in the humanities. I had sat through more than a few doctoral courses and postdoctoral seminars in which Freud's work was discussed, dissected, and deconstructed. But nothing I had experienced up until that point could compare with the clarity of Eagle's thinking or the seamless and persuasive narratives that he wove to explain the origins and nature of Freud's thought. It was a delight. As I listened, I made copious notes, probably more than in all of my other analytic courses combined. Those notes have accompanied me ever since through several decades of teaching psychology to undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students. My “Morris Eagle notes,” as I refer to them, are not only my fall back but they form the foundation for how I have come to understand and teach Freud.
I am taking the liberty of sharing this personal anecdote because it is directly relevant to the task at hand: reviewing Eagle's new book, Subjective Experience: Its Fate in Psychology, Psycho-analysis and Philosophy of Mind. I can think of few people I would rather follow through the thicket of ideas that comprise this book-length series of reflections about past and present theories of mind. And indeed, what stands out about this work is not only the clarity of Eagle's analyses but his facility with ideas across the three different yet interrelated disciplines that he examines. There is much to learn, and we are lucky to have a master instructor to teach us.
But this recognition also creates a conundrum of sorts. Whatever I say will pale in comparison with the analyses that Eagle offers. So rather than leave my concluding remarks a