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This is the final text from a noted historian of psychoanalysis whose many impressive works include Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis , The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida , and Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis . All are tributes to a rich intellectual life dedicated to exploring the roots, influences, and consequences of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Adam Phillips notes in his introduction that
“it was also Forrester's gift to show us that questions about psychoanalysis are questions about the history and philosophy of science—to which he devoted his professional life with such rigour and wit” (p. xii).
The present book is a short collection of essays on rather disparate topics, held together by the author's expertise in illustrating the influence that psychoanalytic insights have had on various topics. Forrester notes that “psychoanalytic writing is not just writing about psychoanalysis; it is writing subject to the same laws and processes as the psychoanalytic situation itself. In this way psychoanalysis can never free itself of the forces it attempts to describe” (p. xv). The author's constant dialectic throughout the text is the dialogue between the necessarily hidden and the transparently shown, like that between conscious and unconscious.
Forrester's chapter on Thomas Kuhn is especially interesting, as the author recalls being a student in Kuhn's class at Princeton University; such memories function as a framework for many of his observations. He reflects on Kuhn's contributions and notes that Kuhn underwent a personal psychoanalysis and used this experience as a model for “getting into another's mind.” This chapter is dense with insight and observation, not only about Kuhn but also about other major twentieth-century thinkers, such as the noted historian R. G. Collingwood. Forrester notes that “what Kuhn adds to Collingwood is the struggle with incommensurability, for which the gestalt switch is Kuhn's personal p