Emerging: A Review of Vitalization in Psychoanalysis: Perspectives on Being and Becoming, Edited by Amy Schwartz Cooney and Rachel Sopher

Abstract

What does it mean to feel like a hole—to be a hole? This evocative metaphor could represent the ruin of existence that once was, or could refer to something that has never been. Is it a state to be defined, filled, or surrendered to? In the past few decades, the accent in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about therapeutic action has shifted (though not exclusively) from accurately interpreting the truth of what was, to participating in the experience of what is, and what could be. Assaying this ontological trend, Ogden (2019) identifies a shift in a focus from the interpretation of dreams (Freud) to the experience of dreaming (Bion) and from interpreting the meaning of play (Klein) to playing (Winnicott). It is in this very spirit that, Vitalization in Psychoanalysis; Perspectives on Being and Becoming, seeks to further understand the experience of being unalive as well as the process of becoming enlivened through psychoanalytic action. In this edited volume of papers, coeditors Amy Schwartz Cooney and Rachel Sopher spotlight a dimension of relational psychoanalysis that is interested in the matter of what self psychologists have described as attention to the