Psychoanalysis through the Life Cycle

From the Introduction by Eugene Mahon: The collected papers of a psychoanalyst may not be autobiographical in the strictest sense but they do illuminate multiple facets of the analyst's clinical experience, his reading experience and his experience with the flux of life itself over many decades; and therefore, in a relative sense, can be called autobiographical. Dr. Silverman has been writing articles for fifty years and as Book Editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly has been reading books and reviewing them for many decades. The articles in this collection have emerged out of an immersion in clinical encounters with children and adults, and his book essays have been the product of very close and serious encounters with the many books he has reviewed. When George Seferis was asked what were the influences that shaped him he said: "A lion is the product of all the lambs he has eaten, and I have been reading all my life." This gastronomic definition of influence is poetically comic but it illustrates the point I wish to make about Dr. Silverman: he has been devouring experience with analysands and books and life itself throughout his analytic career and that makes his collected papers the exciting and partially autobiographical story of his professional life over half a century. This is a great span of time and it is reflected in the vast scope and depth of these brilliant contributions to psychoanalysis. Any reader, who prior to reading the book cover to cover, ponders the array of chapter titles cannot but be impressed by the collection's range and depth: e.g. Sudden Onset of anti-Chinese Prejudice in a Four-Year-Old Girl; Homosexuality in Two Women Treated from the Age of Nine Years; The Male Superego; The Voice of Conscience and the Sounds of the Analytic Hour; Countertransference and the Myth of the Perfectly Analyzed Analyst; The Sorrows of Young Werther and Goethe's Understanding of Melancholia; Death as the Ultimate Castration Anxiety; Sylvia Plath and the Failure of Emotional Self-Repair through Poetry; Gender Identity Disorder in Boys; The Growth of Logical Thinking: Piaget's Contribution to Ego Psychology; On a Central Psychic Constellation; Cognitive Development and Female Psychology; The First Year of Life; The Developmental Profile. The issues grappled with in this book (and I have only listed a few of them) have been engaged with in great depth and sensitivity and no reader who accompanies Dr. Silverman on this intellectual odyssey can come away without having his/her mind challenged by the scope of insight and original thinking contained in these disparate chapters. Each chapter features a mind in total engagement with an analytic idea that troubles him, fascinates him and will not let him rest until he has learnt all that can be learnt from the intellectual encounter.