The Authority of Tenderness

fied emotions that dwell in the “unoccupied spaces in the mind that remain inaccessible to thinking” (xv). In this, she follows Bion (see footnote seven)—who “draws our attention to the idea that the unconscious is not [only] an already existing entity, but psychic work enables it” (xvii)—and Freud (1919h)—who argued in The Uncanny that the affect of the unheimlich “exceeds the interpretations, creating an estrangement from the quotidian but in doing so gives words to an experience that is immense and exceeds verbal language” (xvi). Kaul’s discourse weaves dialectically around the uncomfortable, humbling conclusion that the domain of psychoanalysis, which many once believed to be exactly and fully knowable via empirical observation, is now only indicated—i.e., partially intuited and constructed—by unconscious intraand intersubjective processes that help determine the terms within which psychic representations are given shape. Since we may not be able, completely or with certainty, to know the contents of our psyche or that of our patients in regard to the unrepresented and ineffable, we must depend upon psychoanalytic models and theories that can help us to “approach a mental life unmapped by the theories elaborated for the understanding of neurosis” (p. 37, see footnote seven). And we must live our lives—and practice psychoanalysis— between “the inadequacy of language to capture experience and the compulsion to use it” (p. xvi). HOWARD B. LEVINE (BROOKLINE, MA)