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Peter Homans's new book, The Ability to Mourn, is a chiaroscuro experience: you read through pages of lucid analysis, enter into grey and murky passages, sometimes provocative, sometimes just bombastic, reach complete obscurity, and then are rescued—usually—by a change of topic. Much of the book's darkness stems from Homans's self-consciousness about his enormous ambitions, which have the ultimate aim of nothing less than a “revisionist psychological theory of culture,” but along the way produce revised readings of the history of psychoanalysis and of modernism in general. A serious reader would, I think, find the book worthwhile for its effort at synthesis, but getting through the many overwritten and dull territories does require patience.
The organizing strategy of the book is very simple. Homans sets up conflicts between two views and then offers mediations, dialectical syntheses, theoretical marriage counseling, progress where there has been only frozen debate. At the beginning, he imagines two camps of people influenced by Freud, the slavishly loyal Freudian followers and the rebelliously defiant critics and schismatics, and he offers an olive branch to “break the spell” of their war. Like most of the subsequent antitheses with which Homans works, this one seems to me quite contrived, but the mediating technique employed is, at least, pacific and meant to encourage dialogue.