Psychoanalytic Reflections on Writing, Cinema, and the Arts: Facing Beauty and Loss

If you’ve made your way to this point in the review, you likely are: a friend of the author or a friend of mine, subscribe to the basic tenants of modern ego psychology, are a student whose been assigned this paper, or are someone open-minded enough to read the writings of writers whose orientation has been cast in the shadows by America’s present preference for relational thinking. The extent to which analysts turn away from ideas expressed by those aligned with a different school of thought is most unfortunate; the hostility oftentimes expressed toward those who think differently seems indicative of Freud’s (see footnote 1) concept of “the narcissism of minor differences.” Is my cynicism warranted? Who knows? In one of his last chapters, Busch quotes Ogden as Ogden sets out to address the work of Isaacs who’s theoretic orientation differs from his own. Given this context, and the fact that Busch is about to critique Ogden’s thinking, Busch prefaces his thoughts by noting a larger issue within our field, “our tendency to dismiss critics from outside our circle, and thus lose whatever contributions they might make to our understanding” (p. 187). Wouldn’t it be nice, when expressing one’s analytic opinion, to not have to beg to differ? RICHARD TUCH (LOS ANGELES, CA)