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This is a deeply analytic book. By this, I mean that its author not only revisits and expands our understanding of the core concepts of psychoanalysis that form the foundation of the discipline, but that her analysis of these concepts shows a depth of insight and offers new understandings and interpretations of Freud’s work.
Rosine Perelberg is one of the foremost psychoanalysts of the British Psychoanalytic Society today. She has an international reputation for her scholarly exploration of Freud’s texts in relation to contemporary concerns including femininity, violence and trauma, and has published widely on these topics. This latest book builds on her long-standing interest in a psychoanalytic understanding of time, memory and space, and she vividly illustrates her ideas with clinical vignettes of patients in psychoanalytic treatment, literary references, anthropological theories, and reference to important historical events. She also explores and incorporates psychoanalytic concepts and theories from the French psychoanalytic tradition, which is heavily influenced by Lacan’s works, but with which much of the Anglo-American psychoanalytic community remains unfamiliar. Many of the ideas she presents are complex and assume a prior familiarity with Freud’s works, which may deter readers less versed in the details of Freudian theory. Nevertheless, I would urge such readers to persevere, and the book’s glossary of psychoanalytic concepts is very helpful in this respect.
Perelberg starts with a re-examination of the theme of killing of the father, which recurs throughout Freud’s work in various guises. She makes a crucial distinction between what she calls the ‘murdered father’ and the ‘dead father’. The former refers to an omnipotent narcissistic phantasy in which, through killing the father, the person occupies the place of the father/phallus who possesses all women and tyrannizes his sons in an imaginary/dyadic/anal-sadistic world. The dead father, by contrast, more p