Book Review Essay: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Then and Now

‘[T]he very project of theorizing the self is inherently self-displacing as much as (or rather than) self-centering: the implicit claim of authotheory is that one can best articulate oneself precisely by way of a circuit out, both toward other writers and toward some Other that is denoted Theory. One question raised immediately in this book, then—which employs the desirous, intensely related autotheoretical mode to document states of isolation—is whether the form matches the content, or the claim; that is, whether the writing is best understood as a manifestation of the schizoid condition, or its cure. ’