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realistic psyche perhaps, but energizes the creative imagination in complex

ways” (p. 200). The author follows the sequence of 11 of Freud’s dreams,
self-analysed during the year following his father’s death, that provided ‘step-
ping stones’ to his discovery of the Oedipal complex during that year of
mourning. “Mourning seems to insist on a brutal confrontation with reality,”
Mahon writes in sum, “dreaming seems to need to disguise truth in an elabo-
rate finery of self-deception. Working together they seem to churn the mind,
by appealing to reality and fantasy all at once, an ambiguous state of affairs
that genius . . . exploited with extraordinary results” (p. 209).
Mahon finishes with an epilogue in which he stresses his sense of the
workings of mind as “an odyssey, each individual mind, possessed of its
own unique consciousness, on a journey of self-discovery” (p. 211). For this
author, each analysis, each odyssey, is a vast one, characterized by work on
the multiple levels delineated in the book.
Marie G. Rudden, MD
PO Box 5, West Stockbridge, MA, 01266, USA
E-mail: mgrudden@gmail.com

References
Baranger M, Baranger W (2008). The analytic situation as a dynamic field. Int J Psychoanal 89:795–
826.
Kernberg O (2001). Recent developments in technical approaches of English language psychoanalytic
schools. Psychoanal Q 70:519–47.
LaFarge L (2015). How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining features of
psychoanalytic practice. Int J Psychoanal 95:1265–78.
Ogden T (1997). Reverie and metaphor: Some thoughts on how I work as a psychoanalyst. Int J
Psychoanal 78:719–32.

The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis

by Jamieson Webster
Karnac, London, 2011; 176 pp; $42.95

Webster’s volume, The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis, is a meditation

that invites the reader to delve deeply alongside her into the layers of mean-
ing made manifest through the psychoanalytic inquiry. This layering is inte-
gral to the volume’s intent and process, as Webster invites us into
encounters with the three thinkers whose work has most profoundly
affected her development as a psychoanalyst. Juxtaposed, she offers us three
dreams that are nested within one another such that even she could not
interpret one without the others. The dreams that are part of her own ana-
lytic journey become a means of illustrating that journey to the reader.
Philosophy is an important anchor for Webster, and her musings through-
out the book recognize those thinkers in whom her own thoughts are embed-
ded. She struggles to distinguish between truth and transference as she
disentangles herself from these Masters. We are offered both the remote his-
tory and also the current history of her story as it evolves in her and through

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 Book and Journal Reviews 1185

her but it is the her-story she struggles towards, even as she marks the impor-
tant male thinkers in relation to whom her own thinking has evolved.
She begins with a dream that weds her familial and intellectual histories.
She recognizes this dream, in part, as an emancipation proclamation that
sets her free from the burden of seeking to become that which she is not,
moving instead into the circumstances of her own becoming. She is faced
with her emptiness – her lack – but, with it, her potential. Throughout the
book, there is this recognition of paradox – her embeddedness in a history
that cannot entirely name, contain, or define her. “The gap must remain,”
she writes. “I am always less than what I, or even they, wanted me to be,
but, also, I am more the less. The discrepancy is the source, for Lacan, of
the life of desire” (p. 8).
In line with her reading of Lacan, Webster shows us that she values pre-
cisely what escapes, what resists being pinned down and thus deadened. The
Life and Death of Psychoanalysis is true to these values, resisting easy defi-
nitions or descriptions, rather inviting the reader into a process of discovery
in which it is the process that is the prize. For Webster, truth can only
emerge by chance, in the seeking rather than possessing of knowledge. “The
unconscious is what arrives when intentions fail,” she writes. “If psycho-
analysis is on the verge of death, it will be from having lost its passion, its
Eros that was always both its Eros and its aim” (p. 13).
In tracing her own development, Webster first introduces Adorno, whom
“I loved . . . more than any other thinker, even Lacan” (p. 15). Adorno is
presented as an important anchoring point from which she discusses both
his impact on her and her changing relationship to him and to his ideas.
She recognizes that her love for Adorno can be seen as a recognition of the
negation he points to but also a denial. “He promises nothing and yet, in a
very subtle way, I think you can see that he promises almost everything”
(p. 17). In her relationship to Adorno and the other thinkers she introduces
later in the volume, Webster casts herself in the position of the hysteric, as
Lacan uses the term. In Webster’s hands, the position of the hysteric is also
the position of the feminine; the woman as subject in the conversation. “Is
this not what every hysteric loves?” she writes, “The object proffered to her
at a distance? The distance as what purifies her demand?“ (p. 17).
At a certain point, however, Webster’s reliance on Adorno slips to the
side, as she comes up against the impossibility of relying on Adorno and
also discovering herself. “While Adorno ends in a place I have come to crit-
icize, he nevertheless embodies in this essay the patience necessary in any
reading and any listening taken on without any certainty” (p. 22). Essential,
for Webster, as for Lacan, is the failure of the Master:

You need the analyst to know that you do not need them any longer – you have to
risk desiring them to find out that to have them is to lose them. I had to assume
that Adorno knew without question in order to find my position as a subject who
is allowed knowledge in her own right. I needed Adorno in order to say to you
now that I do not need him any longer.
(p. 22)

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In retrospect, she can see her failure to achieve and recognize her own
certainty, and yet, paradoxically, it was through her identification with
Adorno that she was able to finally locate herself. “So it stands that where
I failed for all these years with Adorno was to refuse to know where
Adorno disappointed me. I think I can say to you that I erred in faith, not
bad conscience . . . I never got as far as my own certainty, just an identifica-
tion with his” (p. 22).
Webster links Adorno’s view that “artwork demands nonidentity – a
truth that springs from a subject” (p. 28) to Lacan’s view of ‘semblance’ as
synonymous with the symptom, “a fiction whose truth is more powerful
than any supposed reality” (p. 29). For Adorno, the broken promise opens
up a new possibility; for Webster, like Lacan, it is the breaking-into itself
that makes possible the coming into being of the subject: “This emptiness,
as we know, is Lacan’s fundamental affirmation; it is his theory of sublima-
tion. The signifier, like the vase, is this radical emptiness as the possibility
of creation” (p. 32).
In Chapter 2, Webster begins with the struggle between interiority and
exteriority – the paradox that “what is most me in myself is this intense
emptiness and one doesn’t know if it belongs to oneself or to nobody” (p.
37). In this chapter, she returns to a dream that took place before the two
she has already reported. “This dream,” she writes, “belongs to Adorno”
(p. 37). “This dream is about disenchantment and love” (p. 38). In the
dream, she creates a World Trade Center memorial in which mutilated angels’
trumpets are encased in concrete. Webster enjoys this dream which she sees
as a wish for nothing: “It is a nothing that is given substance. Contrasted
with the emptiness of the vase, it is the subtle difference between impotence
and impossibility” (p. 39). By its very nature, impossibility is shared. It is
therefore a limit not to fight but to embrace. “If there is any truth in this
dream it is that the memorial is not real no matter how much I wished it to
be so” (p. 39).
In the first dream reported, the dream of the letter, Webster recognizes
her haste to bypass a process and be what she wishes to be rather than
what she is. In the dream of the memorial, she sees the other side: “no one
can” (italics in original unless otherwise noted; p. 40). In the space between,
she recognizes the extensive internal work that had been ongoing. It is the
dreams that most profoundly mark her progress. To highlight this recogni-
tion, she notes Badiou’s idea of love as the affirmation of two, of duality,
the recognition of the absolute disjunction between two positions. Her first
dream marks the fantasy that she might erase or move beyond this disjunc-
tion. In the second dream, she recognizes both the desire and the impossi-
bility of its fulfillment. “The disjunction”, she writes, “is not only between
one person and another but between experience and thought, between love
and knowledge” (p. 41). In refusing what she terms the neurotic “demand
for an essential relation” (p. 44), Webster aligns with Freud’s (1930) state-
ment that “every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he
can be saved” (p. 44).
Webster then shifts her attention more explicitly to Lacan, with whom
“one is trapped between a something that always amounts to nothing, his
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definition of the object, and a nothing that must nevertheless be made

something, his hopes for the subject” (p. 48). “Through Lacan I will take
up what Adorno left behind – the question of what form of sacrifice is nec-
essary and what about this question is specifically feminine” (p. 47). She
notes Lacan’s emphasis on the logic of the unconscious as a recognition of
patterns in relationships: “The mode in which a work touches us, touches
us precisely in the most profound fashion, namely on the unconscious
plane, has to do with an arrangement, a composition of the work which no
doubt ensures that we are interested very precisely at the level of the
unconscious” (Lacan, 1958, p. 4, in Webster, p. 48). Webster uses an anec-
dote from her own childhood to point to the complexity carried in such a
memory. She highlights ways in which such memories can become both a
screen and a structure that hold the threads of meanings such that one
might unpack and follow them. “In one instantaneous glance the con-
straints imposed upon our very being are captured in a series of transac-
tions that unfolds. We have to follow the structure in the series of
displacements” (p. 48).
Following Lacan, the encounter with lack becomes a crucial reckoning
point for Webster. In the face of the difficulties at the core of being – that
one cannot know or be all, one cannot have it all – sacrifice is necessary:

Psychoanalysis, in elevating a certain kind of sacrifice that must be made, attempts

to bypass these temptations – cowardice, perversion – in abiding by their very logic,
drawing out this logic to its end. Psychoanalysis searches out the limit in order to
stay there, trembling, as Adorno said, between fate and freedom.
(p. 63)

In some ways, this point between fate and freedom carries the possibility
of becoming. In particular, for Webster, there is the possibility of discover-
ing oneself as a woman.
For Webster one essential aspect of femininity is flight. The woman is
only discovered in motion, in movement. She introduces three stories of
female confrontation with destiny at different life stages. The lessons, she
contends, lie in a certain silence, a failure to speak, an inability to ultimately
settle the questions that confront us. “The moment of continuing is always
one that will refuse what introduces a form of stasis” (p. 63). Webster links
woman’s encounter with Lacan to one in which, rather than ‘receiving wis-
dom,’ one might encounter one’s own body in a particular way “that I
would say is closer to wisdom about the body as that which feels in a par-
ticular way” (p. 63). It is here that we encounter what is fundamental for
Lacan – the question of lack and its challenge. “The problem for Lacan is
always jouissance, not fantasy. The latter – in its relationship to desire – has
an intimate bearing on the most universal of truths, even in its utterly per-
verse aspects” (p. 65). Gratification, perhaps the ultimate, unattainable fan-
tasy, closes down possibilities through denial, in particular the denial of the
very fact of insufficiency that is inherent in the twoness of the sexes. For
Lacan, then, the realm beyond the possible is designated as the feminine.

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From this framework, femininity designates the unattainability, for men, of

that realm that paradoxically marks the power of the woman.
For Webster, then, inherent in Lacan is the call to women, in particular,
to define themselves. It is in writing, she contends, that women have found
their voices and begun to define themselves, creating through their writing a
feminine voice “that informs both the form and the content of their works.
It is as if saying something about the feminine can only be done as a femi-
nine form of signature within an act of writing. Not a work on, but a work
by, this woman” (p. 66). She finds in Lacan’s later work:

[a] turn to this idea of signature as a final rendition of sublimation – a means of

finding one’s way with their unconscious and jouissance. He would like for desire,
sublimated in this way, to take on a character much closer to the drive pure and
simple – its rhythm and patterning. (p. 66)

Webster hears this call towards becoming, and traces, through early
dreams, her struggle within constraints in which she was impossibly entan-
gled. In tracing her development through her dreams, she writes: “It is not
that these former ways of representation are not mine, of course they are
mine, but I do not quite have a place within their structure” (p. 70). She
goes on: “If I were to try and say what I think Lacan gives to his female
audience, it is his elevation of the feminine, the not-all, Other jouissance, as
the only place which can break new ground” (p. 70). She then quotes from
Lacan (1958, p. 435):

It is indeed something different that is the question. It is the opening, it is the gap
onto this radically new thing that every cut of the word introduces. Here it is not
only from the women that we have to wish for this grain of phantasy or this grain
of poetry, but from analysis itself.
(Webster, p. 70)

Webster notes the paradoxical place in which she finds herself, following
these male thinkers who lead her both towards and away from herself. She
warns against those who follow the word of Lacan rather than the essence,
an essence in which she locates a particular ethic in which one must be will-
ing to not know the answers in order to be a psychoanalyst. Because of the
primacy paid to the unconscious, the analyst’s ethic, quoting Lacan (1973,
p. 16): “would be founded on the refusal of being unduped, of always being
more strongly the dupe of this knowledge, of this unconscious which, when
all is said and done is our only lot in terms of knowledge” (in Webster, p.
86). As such, she warns against following the words of the Master rather
than accepting the challenge as it presents itself in the lived moment:

I would say that I follow Lacan because I don’t really know what it is to be Freudian
any more . . . If Lacan wanted to be called Freudian, then I will say that I am a Laca-
nian in the only way that someone who stands so far outside a discourse can claim
that interior for herself – with total belligerence. A predicate come ethical subject.
(p. 87)

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For Webster, Lacan’s ethics are:

grounded through desire in a faith in almost nothing, emptying the future of con-
tent, audacity is a testimony to ethics. The words reserve, precariousness, grace,
come from the attempt to conceptualize this place of an impossible opening – a
narrow crack in a rock. These virtues, rather than merely a consequence, an effect
of analysis, are also its driving force.
(pp. 87–8)

Inherent in the psychoanalytic enterprise, for Webster, as for Lacan, is

risk:

If it seems like a fantasy of sacrifice in the form of a sacrifice of fantasy, that

would be a fair characterization. I don’t really think that sublimation can be de-
linked from fantasy, nor from an elaboration of it, which inevitably means endur-
ing or accepting some form of cut.
(pp. 90–1)

Through Lacan, Webster seems to find a pushing off place, a ground

through which she can better locate herself:

This is more or less how I have learned to think through Lacan – to find room to
breathe under the weight of his voice and gaze. It is not a body of knowledge in
the end, but knowledge of the body that fails, that laughs, that dreams, and risks
everything. ‘When a slave redeems himself, he is master only in this – that he risks
everything . . . It is here, in some way, that the function of the analyst offers some-
thing like the dawn’ (Lacan, 1991/2007, p. 176).
(p. 91)

For Webster, there is a passion afforded by the renunciation inherent in

the teachings of Lacan. She discovered, paradoxically, that she could find
relief from the suffocating weight of the jargon and sheer expanse of
Lacan’s teachings when she learned to “let him pass through you, like the
air that one breathes” (p. 94). Webster introduces another dream as a way
of pointing to the dilemma she encounters. In the dream, she finds a book
in which is written: “One has to use breath. Your eyes, hands and voice will
be too disruptive to the rhythm necessary” (p. 95). In this dream, we can see,
in a condensed and embodied form, this realization that Webster has been
coming to about her own need to become embodied in her own form, to
breathe in, but to also recognize the power of her own breath. She contends
that it is the very impossibility inherent in the dream; to fell a tree with a
breath – that provides relief from an injunction that one cannot fulfill.
“Nothing seemed more natural than this: An image of grace, a way with
desire, patience and tact. Psychoanalysis is the grace of a losing strategy”
(p. 95). For Webster, it is in the failure to achieve the wish that possibility
emerges:

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Only when we have given up trying to have full access to a thing from which we
are barred . . . can we learn to find a certain rhythm that is our own – precisely in
an encounter with this limit. Language happens not because of a successful substi-
tution but by virtue of a radical separation.
(p. 97)

In her third chapter, Webster turns to Badiou. Learning Badiou’s system

of thought, she says, “was an important step in learning how to rethink
Lacan, to think against Adorno, to get out from under the traps of nihilism
and melancholia” (p. 99). She sees in Badiou someone whose allure invites
one to fall into the trap of accepting a Master rather than discovering
something beyond the illusion of whatever truth the Master holds. In spite
of this allure, Webster is able to locate herself in relation to Badiou, and
uses his critique of the concept of Human Rights as a way of exploring the
unique relationship between truth and agency, as illuminated by a psycho-
analytic perspective. For the psychoanalyst, truth is inevitably elusive. It
can be sought but never captured: “The requirement of the analyst’s posi-
tion is such that we empty ourselves of any preconception of truth – truth
is always being something beyond us, articulated in a discourse that is not
our own, that, if you like, belongs to the unconscious” (p. 108). The work
of psychoanalysis, in part, is to move beyond the illusion of truth, to dis-
cover that the “supposed truth taken as substantial – for example, fantasy,
family mythology, identifications . . . are not substantial truths, but contin-
gent ones” (p. 108).
At another level, Badiou’s insistence on the universality of truth, for
Webster, moves away from the Master/slave dialectic by refusing to invoke
a universal standard that predetermines the subject by enforcing categories
of victim and purveyor of justice. In this way, for Badiou, Human Rights
represents a disqualification of the Other and, as such:

[a] betrayal of truth. Any predetermination of the subject, let’s say also of the con-
tents of the unconscious, any prescription for how one should be in the world, is to
foreclose the possibility of anything new actually emerging. In fact this kind of sta-
tus quo, this normativity, is what best defines ethical systems wed to a metaphysics
of evil – reified standards of one to be followed by all.
(p. 110)

In contrast, in Webster’s view, “we are not agents of truth, rather, in rela-
tion to truth – on its path – we find our agency, our cause. It brings us into
being” (p. 112).
This bringing into being is the challenge raised in this volume, the bring-
ing into being of the individual subject but also, perhaps more strikingly,
the bringing into being of the feminine subject, that subject who eluded
Lacan and Freud before him. In this volume, Webster wrestles with her
own relationship to the various ‘masters’ she has taken up and is, perhaps,
at her best in moments of humour, as when she discusses the problem, for
psychoanalysis, of the “borderline” who “seems to fail to occupy any space,

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maddeningly liminal and evanescent” (p. 116). Referring to an analytic text

about the borderline, she writes:

Taken from reality, no one could have written it any better. It carries within it the
majesty of Beckett, actions that run through themselves with vacuity but seem nec-
essary nonetheless, affect absent or utterly exaggerated, indifference to human dif-
ference and human difference so extreme it begs indifference, and in the last
analysis, theatrical combat which persists in a form that one cannot help but laugh.
(p. 116)

She goes on to offer a transcript from that text in which the roles of
patient and analyst, remarkably, are reversed: “Their words circle and never
meet, until, as is said, they have both reached the end in the beginning.
There is no opening. There is no truth beyond the contradiction, the irrefut-
able gap between speaker and listener. The futility in this little transcript is
heart breaking” (p. 118).
Webster poses the challenge of moving beyond the impasse created when
the patient offers herself up, not to be found or to be assisted but rather to
elude capture, to resist definition: “She is the appearance of disappearance
itself” (p. 120). If she is to encounter something beyond a gaze that misses
her, something new would have to happen. The opening for something new
is something that Webster finds in Badiou, in his exposition of a mystical
vision that is based, not on knowledge, but on faith. “There is something
important for psychoanalysis in Badiou’s St Paul, especially when it comes
to a question of life and death, of courage and fidelity, and also about the
handling of truth” (p. 123). There is a potential shattering that makes this
truth precious and precarious and, in this way, paradoxically also strong.
Badiou’s vision helps Webster to find herself as an analyst who neither
abhors nor loses herself in the lostness of the borderline but rather can be
an analyst “in the process of vanishing, not to lapse into the borderline, the
attractive immanence of her truth, but in order to locate the borderline
position of the analyst” (p. 125).
In this process of finding herself through and then rejecting the authority
of Adorno, Lacan, and Badiou, Webster feels as though she comes close to
the essentials of what it means to become a psychoanalyst. She is in accord
with the position taken by Lacan, in which:

To be an analyst means learning to live through the vertigo of the analytic position,
being put in the position of supposed knowledge and having to find the way both
to accept that position and yet internally to refuse it. One also must find the way
to allow oneself to be discarded, in the end, by another.
(pp. 126–7)

Webster also directly eschews the position of master, herself, preferring to

offer instead the dreams that hold the essence of what she is trying to say
without insisting on being read in any particular way. In one dream, she
encounters a truth highlighted by Lacan of the importance of the view from
the side, the oblique angle. “This something else – in the case of the dream

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a someone else – that will never be in his place, means one can find the
right place, at the right time” (pp. 127–8).
This something else, for Webster, also demands modesty, even shame, in
the face of the inevitability of not knowing. In this, she follows Lacan, say-
ing that for him there was “only one virtue: modesty, pudeur . . . The closer
one gets to shame, the closer one is to the hole in the real from which a
new truth might arise” (p. 130). For Webster, thinking of shame in this way
is an important orienting device in the analytic enterprise, reminding her to
continue orienting herself rather than seeking knowledge that will be inevi-
tably elusive:

Shame, when working on that side of the truth of desire in analytic work, holds up
the power of the impossibles rather than grinding away in the face of them. This
edge of impossibility, and the shame at the sham of what one does, are the only
ways I can work clinically. Orienting oneself, knowing how to find one’s way, is
different from what one may call the register of having – possessions, accumulation
– and this holds just as much for truth itself.
(p. 131)

Truth remains an elusive but important aim for Webster, who values in
Badiou his determined, even if impossible, search for truth. “Symptoms
attest to that divide between thinking and doing, between mastery and
truth, which leaves psychoanalysis in a domain where insight is valued over
speech, which, in effect, changes nothing for a subject in relation to mas-
tery” (p. 133). This position, for Webster, is the analytic edge, in which one
sits with precisely what one does not know and cannot offer. From this
place, “the analyst does nothing but sit. Knowledge does not progress
through critique or filter or force but through an audacious leap through
artifice in which we give truth back to God” (p. 134).
Webster states as her premise for this book: “Leclaire’s notion that there
is no truth beyond or before unconscious desire, which supports truth as
much as it veils it” (p. 135). She learned, she says, as her own thinking
evolved, the centrality of the unconscious as the locus of desire and of
truth. As her dreams progressed:

[She] had the strange sensation of being able to write less and less about them as if
one was closer to this supposed formula of desire – the place where interpretation
stops, the moment when an object comes closest to the thing and no longer requires
the supplementation of meaning. A purified signifier, close to absolute nonsense,
impossibility, and something like the rhythm of the body that animates speech.
(p. 136)

She links this point of impossibility to a certain anonymity, perhaps

the anonymity of the unconscious that, in abstracting down to the essen-
tials, speaks to the universal. This anonymity would seem to be an exten-
sion of the shame that lends itself to a certain restraint, a “quality of
reserve” that Webster says “came to guide my idea of the ethics of psy-
choanalysis precisely as prudence, tact, grace, and modesty, which were

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only possible as linked to the feminine . . . in accordance with the Laca-

nian collapse of the feminine and the unconscious – the necessity for a
confrontation with impossibility” (pp. 136–7). Paradoxically, she moves
towards this anonymity by staying as close as she can to her own desire,
her own unconscious. “Psychoanalysis, one could say, if it does anything,
truly initiates a series, a chain of associations, a set of signifiers, which
begin to articulate desire . . . it gets things moving . . . it begins to high-
light the subject” (p. 137).
Psychoanalysis points indirectly to the subject by illuminating external
influences, the mothers and father, the Adornos and Badious, which then
merge as not oneself, “these others who had paralyzed the subject with their
imagined watchful gaze, return to the mere fact of an encounter” (p. 137).
The question changes, she contends, from what one might hope for to
“from where do you hope?” (p. 138). Through her encounters with her
transferences and her dreams, Webster hopes, not to explain, but rather to
point to psychoanalysis as “a writing that complicates the process of
exchange, destroys any supposed symmetry between the partners, and in
this, risks losing them completely. It does so founded on little else than a
guiding ethics and an intensity of passion” (pp. 138–9). In the process of
slowly giving up looking for herself in places where she could not be found
– in the other’s gaze, in the mind of another – Webster rediscovers her love
for learning, as she looks, not for answers, but rather for further enlivening,
for inspiration.
In closing, Webster reports one last dream that occurred during her final
editing of this book. In this dream, she recognizes her changed relationship
to the psychoanalyst, who might encourage further encounters with the
unknown and who might offer the possibility of an alternative view without
having an answer. In this volume, Webster seems to be trying to take that
place in relation to her audience; to invite the reader into the pleasure of a
process that can be life-giving and life-enhancing if one does not allow one-
self to be killed off by whatever received knowledge one might mistake for
one’s own truth, one’s own desire. In writing of the life and death of psy-
choanalysis in her own voice, Webster reminds us that the death of psycho-
analysis is always near at hand, if we forget that its value, utility, and truth
lie in the psychoanalyst’s ability to be humble in the face of a process that
she can best facilitate by not getting in the way.
Some psychoanalytic authors – like Klein, for example – are best read as
poetry. Webster may be one of those authors. This book takes the reader on
a journey through an internal landscape that is compelling in its ability to
unsettle answers that may have settled over and clogged the pores of the
questions we should be asking. Webster’s view of femininity as something
that is in flight, in motion, may be an important model to have in mind as we
consider the life that is made possible through psychoanalysis when we are
willing to let whatever has become ossified die away and reveal the further
layers awaiting exploration. This is not a book for those seeking answers but
rather an engaging meditative contemplation on meaning and becoming.

Copyright © 2016 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2016) 97

1194 Book and Journal Reviews
Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP
The Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, MA 01262,
USA
E-mail: mcharlesphd@gmail.com

References
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. S.E. 21. London: Hogarth.
Lacan, J. (1958) the seminar of Jacques lacan Book VI: Desire and its interpretation 1958–1959
(cormac Gallagher, trans.). Unpublished copy for personal use only.
Lacan, J. (1973). The Seminars of Jacques lacan Book XXI: the dupes Err 1973–1974 (cormac
Gallagher, trans.). Unpublished copy for personal use only.
Lacan, J. (2007). The Seminars of Jacques lacan Book XXI: the Other Side of Psychoanalusis
(Russell Grig, trans.). New York: W.W. Norton and Co. (original work published in 1991).

The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays
by Franco Borgogno with a Foreword by Peter L. Rudnytsky
Karnac Books, London, 2013; 402 pp; £34.94

As a result of a patient having initially plunged her analyst into a great

silence, paradoxically, we have an account of the subsequent analytic treat-
ment that has the makings of a 19th century novel in its capaciousness. In
therapy, as elsewhere, life needs ample room to come into its own and, as
much an orchestrator as an author on this occasion, Franco Borgogno has
put together a remarkably inventive text, The girl who committed hara-kiri,
on early infantile trauma and the borderline psychotic transference. Borgog-
no makes an explicit claim on the analytic community for a ‘polyphonic’
response in his chapter on ‘Little Hans’, which, in light of the “ground-
breaking and dramatic content” (p. 255) of Eissler’s interviews with Max
and Herbert Graf, includes a postscript to an earlier paper of Borgogno’s
on Freud’s case history. Beyond this particular case, however, the claim on
the many voices of psychoanalysis may be seen as something of an organiz-
ing principle in a series of dialogues on history and intergenerational
trauma, the intrapsychic and intersubjective, transformation and witnessing,
spoilt children, and working-through with patients who are difficult to
reach.
Multiple rather than selective, indeed many-voiced rather than eclectic,
the form of the book ideally expresses the author’s long-standing commit-
ment to the dialogical nature of psychoanalysis. Dostoevsky isn’t quite the
right model here. Dickens and Stevenson are probably closer to the mark;
in fact, a quote from Great Expectations provides the epigraph for the sec-
ond part of the book and Dickens, whose David Copperfield Borgogno
quotes elsewhere in relation to abandonment and orphanage, could be seen
as the guiding spirit in a book that has urgent things to say about family
violence and the ill-treatment of children. I favour Dickens therefore as the
appropriate model, although in the interview with the author from 2010
that closes the book, Borgogno himself nominates the Spanish poet Antonio
Machado and the Portuguese writer Jos
e Saramago as “the ones who

Int J Psychoanal (2016) 97 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis