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For the contemporary student of psychoanalysis, it is not surprising that this book contains no surprises. Hanly gives us a series of wide-ranging studies of a large number of subjects adjacent to psychoanalysis: the philosophy of metaphysics and innateness; the ethical theories of Kant, Hobbes, and Mill; Shakespeare's King Lear; Plato's Republic; the psychopathology of the trial process; the problem of values; and other topics he relates to die analysis of truth. Carefully and critically crafted, topic by topic, diese chapters are all presented from the traditionally established interpretive point of view —namely, that of Freudian instinctual-libidinal metapsychol-ogy—as though it remains hardly affected by its applications, and as though no others may equally recommend themselves for interpretive consideration. Wherefore: no surprises.
As the readers of this journal are well aware, a wide diversity of perspectives on interpretive metapsychology is now in evidence at many different schools of psychoanalysis. The pluralism of working perspectives on psychoanalytic metapsychology may not sit well with those who seek coherence, orderliness, and the authority of a singular tradition. Pluralism is, nonetheless, an irrepressible and undeniable fact of contemporary psychoanalytic life. In keeping with it, Hanly may reasonably claim the perspective of his choice; yet, by that same token, so may his readers lay claim to their own. In vain, however, does one search this volume for the clear attribution of merit and substance to possible metapsychologies alternative to his choice, metapsychologies long available at the interpretive and speculative order of clinical psychoanalytic inquiry. What one finds implicit throughout this book, instead, is a monolithic character of psychoanalytic interpretation that no longer obtains, if, in fact, it ever really did even in Freud's prime.
This issue is made the more troublesome—at least, to this reader —by the following convergence of ide