These lively and thought provoking papers by Arnold Richards highlight a number of themes which will be relevant to the student of psychoanalysis, whether clinician, academic, or member of the educated lay public. Richards wears his learning lightly, educating without being pedantic, and spicing up his prose by engaging in a number of significant polemics, particularly against the psychoanalytic establishment. He is adept at illuminating how the concepts of Bildung and Fleck’s ideas about thought collectives and styles frame the history of psychoanalysis and provide a context for an inquiry into its scientific sociology of knowledge. Reading his papers on Freud and Brill and the historical and cultural role of Jewishness, including ambivalence about Jewish identity, is to encounter texts rich in clinical insight and historical understanding. There are penetrating studies into the fascinating and troubled history of the relationship of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Richards himself exemplifies a contemporary and vital role of Bildung. He has a profound education grounded in the classics (including the classics of different schools of psychoanalysis). He has a well -developed cultivated sensibility, marked by intellectual curiosity, multiple life experiences, and an open-minded attitude toward learning and rethinking old pieties. While he demonstrates a broad character formation, one that places great importance of the cultivation of the inner world, he also embraces an attitude of pluralism, a critique of exclusionary politics, and the affirmation of the continuous exchange of differing perspectives.
David James Fisher, Ph.D., psychoanalyst and European cultural historian, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and a Senior Faculty Member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He is the author of Bettelheim: Living and Dying; Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition; and Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement.