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This review is really out of place here, since those reading it will be unlikely to buy a book which is aimed at a lay readership. The author attempts to present a psychoanalytic view of the human condition to an uninformed and even sceptical
reader. She does this by explaining the concept of unconscious phantasy, and she shows how such phantasies, and the defence mechanisms based on them, exert a powerful and otfen detrimental influence upon everyday human interactions.
The book had been well reviewed elsewhere, and I looked forward to reading it. One of the greatest pleasures of psychoanalytic or therapeutic work is the constant rediscovery of the existence and power of unconscious phantasy, in the face of one's own internal resistances which constantly tend to render one uninformed and sceptical. I hoped, therefore, that as I read this book I might experience yet again such a pleasure of rediscovery.
Ms Segal writes honestly, persuasively, and clearly, and probably achieves her stated aim of describing and explaining psychoanalytic ideas. This reader, however, found himself disappointed, and might really have expected as much. Psychoanalytic insights can be no more than “interesting” unless experienced with personal emotional conviction, and this is the problem faced by all of us who attempt to “teach” psychoanalysis to people who have no personal experience of therapy or analysis. Much of this book comprises descriptions of phantasies often existing in the unconscious minds of people in a large number of specific everyday situations — often deeply emotional ones such as the birth of a new baby. Despite the inclusion of brief “clinical” examples, the obvious enthusiasm of the writer, and the lively style in which she writes, I found the descriptions seemed increasingly dry and meaningless as I read through the book. Perhaps she has tried to cover too many situations, so that the potential emotional impact upon the reader is too much to be assimilated.
What I did r