New Books In Psychoanalysis

Adrienne Harris and Steven Kuchuck‘s The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (Routledge, 2015) contributes to the resurgence of interest in Sandor Ferenczi since the early 1990s when Harris published another book also titled The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi with co-editor Lewis Aron. As Harris says in the interview, the resurgence is partially explained by the work of Steven Mitchell, relational psychoanalysis, and the Vietnam war! War is of particular interest to Harris because it challenges the illusion of intrapsychic privacy and self-containment that traditional psychoanalysis cultivates. War is traumatizing and Ferenczi did not avoid investigating its shattering, splitting, dissociating effects as well as the effects of other disrupting impingements from the external work, in contrast to the classical psychoanalytic emphasis on the elaboration of personal fantasy. The book contains 17 chapters by historians and analysts, including discussions that help to show how contemporary psychoanalysis