Editorial

Dear Readers,

An admirer of one of the finest American storytellers, Raymond Carver, recently asked me what psychoanalysts talk about when they talk about love (see Carver, 1981). Her own ability to love has been thwarted into a near silence. “I love you” does not ring true. Associations took us from love to loving, from feeling lovable to being loved.

Born into a poor family, she heard about the soup made of chicken bones, something the mother ate in the first months following her birth. Just as we may have initially resorted to the twofold foundation of the “communal life of human beings … the compulsion to work … and the power of love” (Freud, 1930, p. 101), we could now share the fantasy of deprivation. The bones are not the best nutrients: ever liquid, the love in the early life of this patient had no chance to flow.

This turned out not to be true. The mother had an abundance of milk, so much that she served as a wet nurse to another child whose own mother's breast was dry.

Here, then, two infants at the breast, sharing the white gold but also the time of gazing and holding. They grew into girlhood and then into womanhood. The motif of their connection and rivalry remained unspoken until many years later. It took an even longer time for one of them to be able to ask—and then to forget, and then to ask again: Who got more? Was mother devoted and hopeful, excitable and excited, or was she deadened and split?

This issue of the Review is not about love, even if the word speaks loudly from two of its titles. In “The Myth of Adult–Infant Love,” Gila Ashtor stages a generative interplay between Heinz Kohut's and Jean Laplanche's conceptions of adult–infant relationality—one grounded in “absolute perfection,” another “parasited” by mother's sexuality. While painstakingly revisiting the “myth” theoretically and clinically, Ashtor (a scholar of Laplanche and appreciative of Kohut) is also anchored in a dialogue with the contemporary popular culture of “self-love.” To this cul