From the Editors

Essays

What is it in human nature that drives our desire for certainty even as it may diminish the mystery and surprise inherent in the unknown? In his “Book Essay: How the Light Gets Blocked,” reviewer Todd Dean unites two apparently disparate books: Aden Evens’s The Digital and Its Discontents (2024), which explores the world of the digital in the context of the needs for contingency, unpredictability, and tolerating the unknown, and Jorgelina Corbatta’s Psychoanalysis and Narrative: Literature, Film and Autobiography (2025). Dean explores the complex questions raised by Evens, touching on the human desire to know everything pitched against the equally pressing certainty that one cannot know all without stifling creativity and curiosity. That development requires holding these two forces in equilibrium. As Dean sees it, “Evens is arguing that the digital is making us more and more miserable, totally focused on knowing the facts, and terrified of the unexpected.” He goes on to pose the question whether “the rise of the digital shares with the rise of the political right around the world a need to suppress contingency, as Evens describes it? Or, in more psychoanalytic terms, a fear of free association?” In light of Evens’s ideas, Dean turns to Corbatta’s Psychoanalysis and Narrative: Literature, Film and Autobiography to explore how “creativity challenges our assumptions of what is real. . . . [and] the radical implications of how writing can impact our understanding.”

In his “Book Essay: Modern Drive Theory,” reviewer Eric Marcus undertakes the challenging task of bringing into conversation Freud’s notions of drive theory, Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau’s work to conceptualize modern drive theory, and his own interest in reconciling the drive for survival and the death drive with modern ego psychology by describing two recent books by Schmidt-Hellerau: Driven to Survive: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (2018) and Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe: A Clear Road Through Freud’s Metapsychology Leading to Helpful Finding and New Concepts (2024). Marcus commends Schmidt-Hellerau for her determination “to preserve drive psychology, as the central part of motivation and the basis for energy and for direction, as well as for a complete phenomenology of mind.” In staying with the two-drive theory, Schmidt-Hellerau “posits two basic drives: Libido and Lethe. Libido is active and Lethe is passive. Libido is the sexual drive; Lethe is the self-preservation drive.” In his close reading of these two significant books, Marcus shows the breadth and depth of Schmidt Hellerau’s work. He writes, “It is a real pleasure to follow her thinking as she brings Freudian drive theory up to date and shows us its applicability to a modern, broader psychoanalytic theory.”

Book Reviews

Literature and psychoanalysis have a complex and dynamic relationship, sometimes deeply synergistic, sometimes fiercely at odds. Both languages, psychoanalysis and literature, deal with the intricacies of human experience, and both disciplines insist on close listening, attention to detail and nuance, and curiosity about the human condition. Reviewer Rita Charon explores this unsettled marriage of two equally passionate, interconnected but divergent disciplines in her review of editor Vera Camden’s 2021 book The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis. Charon observes that for Camden, “literature is the source of psychoanalysis, not its handmaiden.” Literature produces psychoanalysis, she asserts, not only because Freud read Sophocles and Shakespeare but because his own discoveries came about through his literary writing and thinking. According to Charon, the notion of “consilience” between literature and psychoanalysis that Camden envisions does not yield “serene acceptance” but rather “sets the stage for vivid confrontational pressure on one another’s perhaps hidden assumptions.” Among many rich observations, Charon notes that the act of reading shares some of the qualities of analytic listening: “The close reader has been theorized as engaged in a dyadic act in which currents arise between the text itself and the person holding the book.” Charon also notes the themes of memory and death that run throughout the book, remarking that both psychoanalysis and literature are ultimately dedicated to the ever-present imperative to confront our mortality.

In his review of The Unconscious in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis: On Lacan and Freud (2024), by Marco Máximo Balzarini, John Dall’Aglio offers a generous, clear, and thoughtful discussion of two particularly complex topics and their interrelation, namely neuropsychoanalysis and Lacanian theory. Dall’Aglio attempts to break down the main ideas of the book into four arguments, made by Balzarini, showing why these two approaches to the study of the human mind are incompatible. However, Dall’Aglio takes issue with Balzarini’s assumption that there is “a mutual exclusivity between biology and psychoanalysis.” Rather, Dall’Aglio suggests, “Objective (neural) and subjective (mental) phenomena are two appearances of the same underlying thing in nature, which is neither physiological nor psychological. Consequently, brain does not cause mind.” Nonetheless, Dall’Aglio appreciates Balzarini’s efforts to draw on Lacanian ideas, noting that “Lacanian psychoanalysis offers rich resources for critically conceptualizing different discourses and how they appear in the clinic and the lab.”

In teaching candidates, at clinical meetings, and in supervision, I’ve often heard candidates bemoan the institute’s traditions and rituals around teaching Freud, questioning whether his ideas remain relevant. They are dubious of the common institutional devotion to reading Freud when, they argue, there are many other, more contemporary, thoughtful psychoanalytic authors who have challenged Freud’s work. Have we not, they query, moved beyond Freud? In his review of Louis Roussel’s book, Teaching Freud Now: Time Traveling Dialogues (2025), Mitchell Wilson addresses this question by demonstrating the importance of the humanistic, Socratic tradition of “Intimate conversation. A commitment to sincerity. An ethic of listening to learn from the other, soul to soul.” Wilson reminds us that Freud’s papers are like living dialogues that resonate across time, history, and culture. For Wilson, Roussel’s book demonstrates something essential about “what it means to teach—that something potentially sacred is at stake—and shows us the effort it takes to teach well.” Wilson continues, “[Roussel] tells his students on the first day of class that the doing of teaching and the doing of psychoanalysis are directly and tightly linked.” Reading Freud in an intimate way, engaging together in the class with the close study of the text, is an essential element of “each candidate’s analytic formation, their intimate engagement with their desire to work as an analyst.”

In his review of Eric Marcus’s 2022 book, Modern Ego Psychology and Human Sexual Experience: The Meaning of Treatment, Cuneyt Iscan traces the various pathways of resistance to the acknowledgment of human sexuality as a significant aspect of human experience that is worthy of understanding. Iscan takes us through the history of sexuality, noting how often it is treated as something to be feared, ignored, unseen, and most definitely unspoken. “Psychoanalysis,” Iscan suggests, “can claim the victory in allowing for a deeper understanding of human experience and affording the necessary complexity in understanding human sexual behavior.” He describes Marcus’ book as an attempt to address these difficulties in bringing sexuality into the consulting room. In Iscan’s view, Marcus makes a worthy attempt to encourage psychoanalysts to approach sexuality more directly, with an ear for the complex psychic dimensions of sexuality.

Profile: Salman Akhtar

How does one take the measure of the life of a psychoanalyst whose creative fires have produced over 100 published books, whose experiences, interests, and curiosity span the distance across two (and more) continents, whose writing includes scholarly papers as well as poetry, and who writes as seamlessly in English as in his mother tongue, Urdu? For this profile, Indrany Datta-Barua spent hours in deep conversation with both the analyst and his texts, and succeeds at bringing Salman Akhtar’s wisdom, wit, and humanity to life on the page, an accomplishment that required the capacity and willingness to immerse herself in the work and spirit of the renowned psychoanalyst. The result is this profile, which will undoubtedly engage and intrigue the reader. Datta-Barua offers a glimpse into Dr. Akhtar’s lifelong love affair with psychoanalysis, describing the unfolding of “his initial excitement and hunger, his early years of feeling insecure and unsure (but hopeful), the validation of growing success and gratification of youthful grandiosity . . . and his frustrations and vulnerability as he grows into a mature clinician and teacher.” In addition, the reader learns of “his disillusionment as the flaws of idols are revealed.” As Datta-Barua sees it, Dr. Akhtar’s “relationship with psychoanalysis has developed into a mature, realistic, ambivalent affection.” The three major contributions that Dr. Akhtar himself identifies, “his poetic sensibility, his development of psychoanalytic theory with respect to immigration and culture . . . and his focus on human goodness,” permeate the pages of this thoughtful and appreciative profile piece.

Why I Write: Ice and Apsa: The Words to Say It

Madelon Sprengnether offers a moving tribute to a neighborhood in a city and a country she calls home but that no longer feels like home to her. Under siege, embattled, helpless, and horrified by the hatred and violence she confronted in her hometown, she tells us of arriving at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting. There, in the liminal space between wakefulness and reverie, between normalcy and nightmare, she reflected on the urgency, immediacy, and perils of Otherness. Ultimately, when words fail, she turns to the power of music, allowing the intensity of the rhythms, the lyrics, and the soulful voice of a great American songwriter, Bruce Springsteen, to reach beyond language, straight to the center of her grief.

In Memoriam: Tyger Latham

The Book Review editors want to mark the loss of one of our exceptional reviewers, Tyger Latham, who died on May 4, 2026. Tyger, a teaching analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, was a highly respected and valued member of the analytic community. Along with being a thoughtful scholar, a sensitive clinician, and an excellent teacher, Tyger was committed to seeking meaning and truth in the social and historical context of our lives. In his review of Roger Frie’s recent book, Edge of Catastrophe, Tyger wrote,

But what are psychoanalysts to do with such insights? In the past, we tended to abstain from weighing in on such social issues, often out of a fear of being perceived as partisan and unanalytic. However, as Fromm revealed, we are all products of society. Suspending this reality, even when done so consciously in the interest of clinical neutrality, can come at a cost. If we choose to remain silent in response to authoritarianism, when they eventually come for us, there may not be anyone left to speak out.

We are grateful to Tyger for speaking out and for his many contributions to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Review of Books. His voice will be greatly missed.