Description
The theme of this book is that of a rescue operation. The victim is psychoanalysis, in danger of potential demise as a result of its flirtation with the neurosciences, the relationists, and the numerous other efforts to improve upon or recast its fundamental thesis, which is the effort of one person, the analyst, to understand another person, the patient.
Not surprisingly, the threat to understanding is misunderstanding: this threat begins with all who have misunderstood Freud and includes those who insist that psychoanalysis is something other than this major effort of understanding.
Goldberg’s approach to the elaboration of this theme is to undo the dualisms that infect all of psychoanalysis: explanation vs. understanding, mind vs. brain, subject vs. object, form vs. content. The author takes on each of these supposed points of opposition and demonstrates how they act as a conceptual straitjacket, forcing us to conform to what they propose. The alternative to such constraints is a postmodern freedom, i.e., the use of whatever works best on any given occasion.
Throughout the book, the author employs the theory of self psychology alongside philosophy in order to help psychoanalysis embark upon a newer and freer adventure, one that releases it from various efforts to either reduce psychoanalysis to a stepchild of the neurosciences or to a cousin of social psychology. Bringing together the contributions of Heinz Kohut and Martin Heidegger may seem like an impossible feat, but the author carefully points out how Kohut’s concept of the selfobject is in fact the crucial theoretical underpinning to properly position today’s psychoanalysis alongside the philosophy of Heidegger. In his Appendix, Goldberg shows the interdigitation of the ideas of these two great thinkers.
