The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott and The Legacyl Of Freud. By Peter L. Rudnytsky. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1991,  220 pp. Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces; Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott. Peter L. Rudnytsky, ed. New York:  Columbia University Press, 1993,  315 pp.

In these two books, Peter Rudnytsky continues his project of defining the trajectory of his own “transferential relation” to psychoanalysis and his vocation within it as a literary critic and cultural historian. The first of these volumes, The Psychoanalytic Vocation, follows in the line of Rudnytsky's important study on Freud's relationship to the Oedipus theme , and traces a crucial moment in the development of psychoanalysis and its aftermath; the second is a collection of critical essays drawing on Winnicott's understanding of creativity and potential space. Within these frameworks, Rudnytsky's two endeavors have a great deal to say. Both are concerned with the grounds for critical reading, whether of psychoanalytic theory or literary and cultural phenomena, and both locate Winnicott as the central and most productive source of recent developments in psychoanalytic explorations.

Rudnytsky shows himself to be a careful reader of psychoanalytic theory and its applications, able to disentangle conflicting reifications of theory. The Psychoanalytic Vocation lays out its task and claims its territory clearly, giving its title a threefold meaning. First, Rudnytsky refers to his own engagement with psychoanalysis, then to an attempt to resolve the conflict between views of psychoanalysis as either a hermeneutic or a scientific discipline, and finally to the mother's “vocation” in bringing her child into a creative life. In a series of chapters, the book follows the movement that has taken place in psychoanalysis toward allowing an understanding of a “science of relations” (Rank's phrase). Reviewing the importance of major shifts in psychoanalysis today — from an emphasis on oedipal dynamics to one on preoedipal concerns, from a triangular matrix to a dyadic one, and from a classical drive theory model to varieties of object-relations models Rudnytsky then seeks to reframe the discussion of post-Freudian psychoanalytic history. He explicitly rejects the Lacanian “postmod