Reflecting Psychoanalysis. Narrative and Resolve in the Psychoanalytic Experience.: Jurgen Reeder. London & New York:  Karnac, 2002. Translated from the Swedish original: Berättelse og avgörande i den psykoanalytiske erfarenheten. Stockholm:  Natur och Kultur, 1996.

At the start of his book, Jurgen Reeder tells us something about how it came about: “I was struck dumb before my analysands.” The author underwent a crisis during his training, affecting the very relationship to the psychoanalysis he sought to put into practice. It may be wise to keep in mind this point of departure, as one pushes one's way into this very interesting but demanding book.

In one respect, a theoretical work aiming to forge new concepts makes up the main bulk of the book. The strongest influence then comes from Lacan, but in no way does he appear as a guardian angel. Rather than being an external reference, Lacan seems well-integrated into the author's reconstruction of a new outlook. Reeder is ambitious in his theoretical work, for instance, as he attempts to derive “a general metapsychological model for the development of fantasy”. However, on the other hand, we soon become aware of a somewhat contrasting tendency in this book which seeks to clarify how knowledge, theoretical as well as practical, may hamper a quest for a more profound understanding.

There is a distinction here, to be noted, between knowing versus knowledge; the former concerns a capacity for saying or knowing, whereas knowledge has to do with content. This distinction is much to our concern, as we daily try to relate to the unconscious. The unconscious is always “susceptible to colonisation by knowledge”; in other words, theory may, in a very similar way as the ego, distort the strangeness of the unconscious.

Psychoanalysis is related to a dominant trend in Western epistemology termed representationalism which, among others, the American philosopher Rorty has brought to our attention. Let us be more concrete: to what extent can an interpretation be said to represent what is interpreted, that is providing a verbal clothing of the content of a repressed memory Does it, for instance, simply lay bare something which already has existence within the psyche (an infantile complex; intrapsychic