Blacks and Jews on The Couch: Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Black-Jewish Conflict. Edited by Alan Helmreich and Paul Marcus. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998,  229 pp.

Blacks and Jews on the Couch represents Paul Marcus's and Alan Helmreich's contribution to the applied psychoanalytic literature. In prior works, Marcus, a practicing psychoanalyst and prolific author, has distinguished himself by his original papers and skillfully edited collections of essays. He has written about the Holocaust, trauma, Judaism, and psychoanalytic perspectives on the human condition.

This superb book brings the psychoanalytic searchlight to the exploration of Black-Jewish conflict. Psychoanalysis deals with that which threatens and which all too often remains unspoken and hidden. In this regard, the editors unflinchingly brought together a disparate group of psychoanalytically informed thinkers and insisted that they attempt to make sense of the climate of distrust and hostility that permeates contemporary Black-Jewish relations.

The major significance of this volume stems from a temporary, but much needed, respite from sociopolitical and socioeconomic inquiries into Black-Jewish conflict in the United States. Instead, the reader is offered a psychodynamically based analysis of Black-Jewish conflict viewed from classical, object relations, self-psychological and Lacanian perspectives. Avoiding even a hint of the obstructive hindrance of lock-step political correctness, the contributors go at their assigned tasks with intellectual candor and the analyst's commitment to uncover the unconscious determinants of irrationality in thought and behavior. The contributors apply their analytic skills and delve as deeply as necessary in their efforts to understand respective Black and Jewish perceptions, resentments, fears, and yearnings.

The context of the twelve chapters comprising this work is put