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A provocative and potentially dangerous title, Psychoanalysis and Wisdom: Encountering ‘Ethics of the Fathers’ joins a considerable collection of concise and well-referenced books by Paul Marcus, a training and supervising analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City. Marcus has been writing about ethical, spiritual, and philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis for decades; he is a living Master. Most notable among his works are Ancient Religious Wisdom, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis , In Search of the Spiritual , and Psychoanalysis as a Spiritual Discipline .
Despite some thematic repetition, the argument that Psychoanalysis and Wisdom is but a reprise of earlier work would be both unfair and untrue; this book's ambition is more salutary than it is educational. Here, Marcus is engaged in ethereal heroics to help save psychoanalysis, which he feels is in a dire state. Our craft is aging culturally; it is in “conceptual disarray as a theoretical discipline … a theory in crisis” (p. 1). His thesis, one born of hope and originality, is laid bare at the very outset: “Psychoanalysis is still capable of being a robust interpretive framework as it applies its insight to understand one of the greatest examples of wisdom teachings, the Ethics of the Fathers” (p. 2).
The Ethics Marcus is referring to are a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, “an anthology of sayings of the greatest post-biblical Jewish sages” (p. 2). The gamut of what constitutes a flourishing life, addressed in the book, is aptly summarized by Rabbi Jill Jacobs as including learning, service, discipleship, ethical behavior, humility, and equitable judgment. Marcus would like his readers not only to better appreciate what psychoanalysis can offer and add to these teachings in its own interpretative ways, but also to have them consider critically what an ancient yet still relevant Ethics might have to offer psychoanalysis in return. The conceit here is that a wisdom-lade