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Winnicott’s Collected Works, Part II
We are pleased to open this issue with the second installment in a series of reviews of The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, commissioned by guest editors Philip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris. Here Giuseppe Civitarese treats us to a marvelously engaging review of Volume 3 (1946–1951).
The Life and Times of Edith Jacobson
Readers of the Review of Books may recall that JAPA 68/5 featured Part 1 of Martina Kolb’s essay on Edith Jacobson’s Black Prison Notebook, titled “Poetic Agency: Edith Jacobson’s Captivity.” There Kolb explained how Jacobson’s prison notebook was discovered in a shoebox of papers inherited by Judith Kessler and was then published in a volume she edited with Ronald Kaufhold. Kolb explores in that essay how the act of personal writing, both in prose and especially in verse, helped Jacobson tolerate her experience as a political prisoner in Nazi Germany. Here, in Part 2 of her essay—“Well-Versed: Edith Jacobson’s Expressionism”—Kolb focuses on the literary quality of Jacobson’s “intriguing verse,” which “deserves close reading . . . since it shares clear affinities with her germanophone poetic heritage and with contemporary expressionist poetics.” In Kolb’s view, Jacobson was “a noteworthy prison-poet whose work merits wider international circulation”; and though Kessler and Kaufhold’s volume takes a small step in this direction, a definitive bilingual collection of Jacobson’s poetry has yet to be published.
The American Independent Tradition in Psychoanalysis
Nancy Chodorow’s most recent book—The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition (2020)—was the cornerstone of a recent review essay by anthropologist-psychoanalyst Robert Paul (JAPA 68/4). Embedded in the title of Paul’s essay—“Personal Meaning: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and ‘Individuology’”—is an homage to another book by Chodorow, The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (2001). It is a mark of Chodorow’s influence on both psychoanalysis and the social sciences that Paul’s title celebrates “individuology,” a coinage Chodorow uses, in The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye, to encourage a deliberate integration of psychoanalytic and social science perspectives. But Chodorow’s book does more than call for a new, interdisciplinary field of study; it also delineates a distinctly American strand of psychoanalytic theory and practice. This feature of Chodorow’s work—her description of a newly emerging “American independent tradition” in psychoanalysis, which she calls “intersubjective ego psychology”—is the focus of Jeffrey Berman’s appreciative review. Berman observes that Chodorow, like the theorists she cites and admires (Loewald, McLaughlin, and Poland, for example), is herself “a synthesizer and integrator of historically (and sometimes hysterically) polarized theory.” Specifically, Berman explains, “Chodorow’s vision of intersubjective ego psychology combines two major antagonistic schools, ego psychology as formulated by Heinz Hartmann and interpersonal psychology as defined by Harry Stack Sullivan.” We join both Paul and Berman in feeling that Chodorow’s work captures a distinctive theoretical and clinical approach—one worthy of inclusion in institute curricula. We also share this sentiment of Berman’s: “I would love to teach in the individuology department” of a university, “and one of the required texts would be The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye.”
A Psychoanalyst Confronts Mortality
In her review of Corinne Masur’s Flirting with Death, Paula Ellman writes a courageous and frank story of the peculiar love affair between psychoanalysis and mortality—an affair defined by resistance, denial, and disavowal on the one hand, and by inevitability and magnetic attraction on the other. We analysts cannot countenance the thought of our own mortality; nor can we escape it. Ellman wryly states that she might call Masur’s book “Flirted with Death,” as she is just one year out of her own struggle with acute myeloid leukemia. With some distance and some perspective gained from her happily full recovery, Ellman tells us that Masur’s book spotlights an urgent need in psychoanalysis—that is, “the need to think about the responsibility we have to consider our mortality, as facing limits and loss is crucial to living life fully and practicing ethically.” Following her own brush with death, Ellman writes, “Now I live with a visceral recognition of the fleeting nature of life, in great contrast to my earlier belief that life could not possibly ever stop. I know that even though life appears to move along like a reliable, never ending stream, anything can happen at any moment that can completely alter our existence.” This review, submitted before the time of Covid, feels more pressing than ever now that we are facing a global pandemic; as we have all grappled for nearly a year with the heavy weight of an overwhelming number of deaths in our midst due to the coronavirus, we psychoanalysts are called upon to face directly the reality of our own mortality.
Why I Write: Paula Ellman
Paula Ellman’s “Why I Write” can be viewed as a companion piece to her thoughtful and intimate review of Masur’s Flirting With Death, published in this issue. In her evocative essay, Ellman speaks to the developmental progression of the desire to write. Early in her career and over the subsequent years, Ellman’s rich exchange with her writing partner brought her to a very satisfying experience of collaboration, competition, and productivity—all the result of a powerful bond of female friendship, mutual respect, and the ability to serve as one another’s springboard for new ideas, for convergence and divergence, and for the development of a strong and centered voice as a writer. With time and with the shock of a devastating illness, Ellman has allowed her writing voice to seek a more personal, private note, one more inwardly focused. In writing while recovering from cancer, Ellman discovers that the act of writing itself restores her symbolizing function. Writing, she concludes, “changes with my development and movement through life, and I expect that it will continue to change with time.”