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(1999). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 35:335-341

Mystery in Mind

A Review of Pre-Object Relatedness: Early Attachment and the Psychoanalytic Situation: Ivri Kumin. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996. xiii + 240 pp.

Emmanuel Kaftal, Ph.D.

Although There Is Still a good deal of controversy concerning the scientific status of psychoanalysis, most analysts will admit, when pressed, that they do know something and that they bring that knowledge with them into the session. The trouble begins when we try to clarify exactly what we know and how we know it, when we try to stand back from what we know and point to it. This is what I do, this is how I do it, and this why it works. The process of clarifying our own place in the work can concretize what we think of as knowledge. This can cause us to confound levels of abstraction and to create unwarranted theoretical, and ultimately clinical, closure. This is especially problematic when it comes to those aspects of psychoanalytic experience that are intuitive, capricious, and self-contradictory, those things we pluck from reverie or fantasy — those that come “unbidden” (D. B. Stern, 1997) or “off the wall” (Bollas, 1989) and are at the heart of the w

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