15
Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This chapter reviews five works of psychoanalytic scholarship published in 2023: The Poetry of the Word in Psychoanalysis: Selected Papers of Pere Folch Mateu, edited by J. O. Esteve and Jordi Sala; three books about Marion Milner: The Marion Milner Method: Psychoanalysis, Autobiography, Creativity by Emilia Halton-Hernandez, The Marion Milner Tradition, edited by Margaret Boyle Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff, and Alberto Stefana and Alessio Gamba’s Marion Milner: A Contemporary Introduction; and Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis by Stephen Frosh. Following a short introduction, the review is divided into three sections to discuss these works in turn.

Introduction

This year’s work in psychoanalysis offered numerous opportunities to discover or revisit important but less heralded writers and thinkers from the last century. In this review, I explore two psychoanalytic writers especially whose work is either less well known in the English-speaking world—in the case of Pere Folch Mateu—or—in the case of Marion Milner—has been positioned in the margins of another, better-known psychoanalytic writer. In choosing to focus my attention on these two, I inevitably missed opportunities to review other interesting works that also spoke to this theme, such as twin volumes by Ann D’Ercole, Clara M. Thompson’s Early Years and Professional Awakening and Clara M. Thompson’s Professional Evolution and Legacy, charting the earlier and later life of Clara M. Thompson, who pioneered interpersonal analysis in the United States following the controversies of her analysis with Sándor Ferenczi. (Thompson appears in Ferenczi’s clinical diaries as one of those patients with whom he attempted ‘mutual analysis’; she was also the patient involved in the scandal of Ferenczi’s alleged ‘kissing technique’.) Alberto Stefana, whose introduction to Marion Milner is discussed later, also published, in collaboration with Lee Ann Montanaro, a new collection of papers by another woman pioneer: the psychoanalyst, Surrealist, and surgeon Grace Pailthorpe (in Grace Pailthorpe’s Writings on Psychoanalysis and Surrealism). Similarly, Reading with Muriel Dimen/ Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, edited by Stephen Hartman, curates six papers by the late American feminist psychoanalyst and professor, Muriel Dimen, with responses to her work by other writers. In addition to the focus on Folch and Milner, I also review Stephen Frosh’s timely—and therefore challenging and important—work to trace a decolonizing and antiracist ethics in psychoanalysis through its connections to Jewish thinking and the experience of antisemitism.

1. Familiar Distance

The work of leading Spanish psychoanalyst Pere Folch Mateu (1919–2013), is not—yet—well known among English-speaking psychoanalysts. This is something that editors J. O. Esteve and Jordi Sala seek to remedy with their new volume of Folch’s selected papers, The Poetry of the Word in Psychoanalysis. Bringing together ten of Folch’s essays in translation (from Catalan into English, by Roger Marshall and Julie Wark, and under linguistic supervision by Christine English), Poetry of the Word makes Folch’s work available in English for the first time, showcasing the breadth and quality of his psychoanalytic thinking across three decades (the earliest paper is from 1975; the most recent from 2005). Several of these papers are previously unpublished; others were published in the Catalonian psychoanalysis journal Revista Catalana di Psicoanàlisi, itself founded by Folch in 1984.

As Esteve and Sala point out, Folch was not only a clinician and writer, but a leading proponent of Spanish and Catalonian psychoanalysis. Aside from pioneering psychoanalytic writing in Catalan, he also supported the translation of important psychoanalytic works into his native language. Alongside being a training analyst at the Spanish Psychoanalytical Society, he also taught at universities in Barcelona and Paris. During a period in London, he knew and worked with Donald Winnicott, Herbert Rosenfeld, Esther Bick, and Hannah Segal.

His analytical orientation, therefore, was profoundly shaped by both Kleinian and Independent thinking, yet it is Wilfred Bion’s work to whom Folch most often refers in these papers. In their brief introduction, Antònia Grimalt and Mabel Silva map the papers presented in the volume back to key Bionian ideas, such as binocular vision, the PS⟷D oscillation, and negative capability. Like Bion, Folch shares an interest in the ‘minutest details [of] the interactions with the patient’ (p. ix), and his work, too, is replete with literary and poetic references. But his work also recalls other thinkers, such as Christopher Bollas in, for example, his analytic engagement with artistic objects (seen here in the paper ‘Particularities of the Musical Symbol’) and process (in ‘Literary Process and Psychoanalytical Process’).

Folch’s comments on transference are especially lucid. In his 1992 paper ‘Symbolon and Diabolon in the Transference’, he begins by describing the ‘diabolon’ as the symbol’s neglected counterpart. As the symbol indicates an approximation of objects, so the diabolon conveys the sense of ‘distance, widening, and separation’. Both movements are implied and needed, he argues, by the theory of transference (Übertragung in the German original), involving carrying, transmission, and transport, and we each, in the construction of our self-image, ‘transfer’ material—from our past, our biography—into the stories we tell:

Every patient and all of us represent ourselves to ourselves. We have constructed a version of our story and it is this, so to say, personal myth that counts in our present life. This story, in one way or another, is then transported or transferred to present experiences. (p. 58)

Folch imagines this self-construction as an ongoing transport of psychical materials and external experience moving ‘bidirectionally’ in both centripetal and centrifugal movements. Sometimes, he tells us, ‘the unconscious is glimpsed not in the depths but out in the open’ (recalling, perhaps, Bion’s beta-screen), and sometimes the process of transformation requires the closed and settled symbol to reopen in a turbulent but necessary transferential process. In the clinical setting, then, ‘dramatization of the conflict thus transports, transfers, and enables a [freeing] reorganization’ (p. 59). This also recalls Bion’s reading of transference as

an idea that you have ‘on the way’—you transfer it to me as a temporary measure on your way to what you really think or feel. At the same moment the new idea that you have is a temporary one and will be discarded sooner or later. It is another one of those places where you stop on your own particular journey. (Bion, The Italian Seminars [2005], p. 28)

Both music and poetry can awaken this ‘complex transferential process’ (p. 99). In ‘Particularities of the Musical Symbol’, Folch quotes Rilke, noting

the theme of this externalization of a deepest intimacy […]: ‘holy departure: // when the innermost point in us stands // outside, as the most practised distance…” As far as I know, the transferential movement has never been expressed so vigorously and so beautifully. It is a way of finding outside ourselves the deepest depths of our experience. Music would be the occasion of meeting this familiar distance, or the unconscious. (p. 100)

If I was initially nervous to read his 1990 paper, ‘Literary Process and Psychoanalytical Process’, fearing a naive account overlooking the well-established use of psychoanalytic ideas in literary criticism, examples such as these attest to Folch’s sensitivity and sophistication. Elsewhere, he turns repeatedly to poetry to find analogies for the analyst’s work. He quotes the Catalan poet Joan Vinyoli when he relates the poet’s and the analyst’s professionalism in the way that they both turn lyricism and fantasy to good account: ‘Like the poet, the analyst works “with working hands on words”’ (p. 137). Folch himself conjures remarkable imagery, comparing, for example, the oscillation of lyrical and logical modes to ‘the cyclical beating of the heart; to a paranoid-schizoid diastole and a depressive, organizing systole, around which a selected fact may crystallize’ (p. 139).

His 2003 paper, ‘Containment, Acting, and Counter-Acting’, elaborates Bion’s container-contained model of thinking. He reminds us that the container is not a ‘prior condition’ to containment, but is itself a process ‘for tolerating uncertainty and for waiting with a “negative capacity” [capability]; with abstaining from ridding oneself of painful sensations or invasive moods until the work of rêverie has begun to endow them with meaning and make them thinkable’ (p. 126). The simplicity of the image of the container, he suggests, can result in an impoverished understanding of therapeutic achievement if ‘containment’ is narrowly understood in a negative sense, as something that ‘holds in’. The mind, he continues,

is never hermetically contained. It would be more appropriate to say that the mind is an open container that spills over or decants into action. There are difficulties, therefore, when citing failures to achieve the sort of containment that would be most beneficial for the therapeutic relationship. (p. 126)

Folch describes and distinguishes between different types of containment—the progressive layers of intrapsychic containment described by André Green, for instance, and the possibility of ‘expressive containment’ within the psychoanalytic couple, too readily pathologized, when the analysand uses enactment to modify the analyst’s mind. He proposes a ‘wild etymology’ of the word ‘conversation’ (in Latin, con-versare, a pouring) to offer an image of therapeutic ‘co-spilling’:

[W]e might say that the word ‘converse’ could suggest a co-vessar [vessar, to spill or pour in Catalan], a co-spilling, by patient and analyst, of the contents of mental space; a spilling into the container of the setting in this updating, ongoing actuation or enactment that is the transference. Interpreting would then be directed towards what is happening in this confluence of spilled out thoughts, which have been poured into the conversation of the setting. (p. 131)

The image conjured by Folch’s creative elaboration of the container-contained model is not only delightful but clinically sound. Bion also emphasized the potentially communicative aspects of the analysand’s discourse, aspects that are too often redescribed pathologically in terms such as ‘flooding’ or notions of verbal incontinence.

The final chapter in this volume is his 2005 paper ‘The Lyrical and the Logical in the Work of Interpretation’. Folch draws on Bion’s characterization of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as ‘oscillating’ to describe stages within the development and presentation of the analyst’s interpretation, initially describing ‘lyrical’ and ‘logical’ modes of response as ‘polar opposites’, defining these as ‘more or less characterized by creative, imaginative resonance, or […] constrained by conceptual rigour’ (p. 136). So far, so binary, but he proceeds to complicate this, noting, for instance, that he does not only ‘equat[e] logic with [the] depressive integration of the inner experience’ and that ‘cognition is distilled from an emotional experience’ (p. 142). Folch recognizes that the symbol (associated here with the logical, rationally achieved interpretation) does a certain violence to the lyrical rêverie from which it emerges. The logical need not efface the lyrical, and the effective psychoanalyst will also draw on sensorial aspects—such as rhythm and prosody—to imbue the logical with lyrical feeling—while not foreclosing on the patient’s lyrical expression with a too-logical reply. In one example, he describes his own mistake in responding to a patient’s rich but disturbing imagery with a prosaic instruction to ‘breathe deeply!’:

The patient did as I asked and his anguish quickly dissipated, but it was also clear that the opportunity to more fully understand the very concise, eloquent message that I was receiving from him had been lost. In the face of this lyrical condensation of his distress, I had become silent and mentally disengaged; lost in a bewildering sequence, unable to offer containment or understanding. (p. 141)

Folch is both generous and unsparing when it comes to sharing his clinical mistakes. This, too, is something he shares with Bion, though Folch is less gnomic and acerbic in his style, and one can readily imagine the value of his teaching for trainee analysts. He develops Bion’s insights into groups in the previously unpublished paper ‘In Homage to Bion: The Theoretical and Clinical Validity of His Thought’. Drawing on Bion’s theory of groups, he suggests two neologisms, ‘groupality’ and ‘subjectality’, to describe different kinds of internal objects and personality structures that include a group of more ‘gregarious’ (communicative and argumentative) elements. He notes how Bion’s early formulations of group functioning can be mapped onto the individual:

In pointing out the distinction between the basic assumption group and the work group, Bion (1952) calls attention to a differentiation in the group which is not unlike the one he would establish some years later (1957) between the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality. The basic assumption group would coincide in many ways with the psychotic mind. (p. 108)

Folch does not see groupality and subjectality as ‘antithetical to each other’ (p. 110), nor is groupality only to be developmentally superseded by subjectality; like the oscillation of PS⟷D, they overlap and alternate within a healthy subjectivity. Rather as Bion would come to dramatize his own autobiographical material in the form of a crowded dramatis personae of inner ‘part-selves’ in A Memoir of the Future, Folch describes the internal group as ‘actors or characters without an ego-author of the narrative’. He describes the ‘normopathic’ mind subject to the ‘nerve-racking pressure of his groupality’, who takes refuge in external social groups: ‘(sports events, urban gangs, sects of whatever ideology) which have their own internal codes. This will exempt him from the harsh demands of working on his own individuality’ (p. 109).

Folch draws attention to the way that patients are failed when their attempts to establish a connection, in however limited or maladapted a way, go unseen by the therapist. Again, he follows Bion in emphasizing the communicative (not only defensive) aspect of project identification. This is overlooked by the kind of ‘solid, organicist psychiatrist’ who attempts to tell the patient ‘what he has; what he is harbouring inside him, in his central nervous system, like a person who has a tumour or some kind of dysfunction’ (p. 117) within systems of public healthcare unable to offer ‘attention as a form of treatment’ (p. 120). He laments the kind of therapeutic response that is a ‘merely specular response’ (of the potentially trite ‘I can tell that this must be hard for you’ pseudo-empathetic variety) rather than a deeper receptiveness to the patient’s demand, noting that psychiatric recourse to a ‘chemical response in the form of tranquilizers and antidepressants’ (p. 120) may inadvertently drive patients to somatization and acting-out:

This is not about caricaturing the role of the psychiatrist but about seeing the situation as paradigmatic of what can happen more subtly in the psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic setting when, for some reason or other, we lose contact with the patient, with her indisposition; when we fail to respond to the invitation she offers us from the limitations of her discourse and general attitude; when our unease disrupts our capacity for emotional resonance and for being present to the conflict that the patient would have wanted to enact by assigning to the therapist in the transference a specific role through which to represent her inner drama. This patient, who does not know how to get her message through to us beyond the defensive possibilities available to her; who fails to awaken a vibrant reception in us which may transform her inner experience, feels abandoned once again to her desolate inner world. (p. 121)

Folch’s ‘good-enough’ therapist is attentive both to the substance and the form of the analysand’s communication, listening ‘without memory or desire’, yet there is, he seems to suggest, something more to be done. How should we understand his evocation of the therapist’s ‘vibrant reception’ of the patient’s discourse, and what might it look like? In her appreciation of the ‘pliancy’ of paint and other artistic mediums (and by analogy, in the analyst’s capacity for creative and playful responsiveness to the patient), Marion Milner offers one possible answer, and it is to her work that we now turn.

2. Framing the Gap

Pere Folch Mateu’s focus on the ways in which patients attempt to communicate their inner experience is shared by the remarkable writer, artist, and therapist Marion Milner. 2023 saw a resurgence of interest in her work, with no fewer than three new works attesting to her ongoing value and relevance to psychoanalytic thinking and writing. The first of these, Emilia Halton-Hernandez’s masterful The Marion Milner Method: Psychoanalysis, Autobiography, Creativity combines a lucid, broadly chronological introduction to Milner’s books and papers with an examination of her influence on her readership, drawing on fascinating archive material and on two contemporary graphic memoirists, Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel. The Marion Milner Tradition, edited by Margaret Boyle Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff, is the eighth volume to appear in the Routledge Lines of Development series, which has previously included titles on Anna Freud, Winnicott, and Bion, among others. And in their Marion Milner: A Contemporary Introduction, Alberto Stefana and Alessio Gamba likewise reinsert Milner into her rightful place as an important psychoanalytic thinker with ongoing contemporary relevance. These three will also be joined by at least one further volume due to appear in 2024: David Russell’s Marion Milner: On Creativity.

Born at the turn of the last century, Milner (née Blackett, also known under her pen name, Joanna Field) authored eight books, including a posthumous selection of her clinical papers under the evocative title The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men in 2012. She is perhaps best known for her 1950 work On Not Being Able to Paint, in which she explored her own drawings and those of her patients through a psychoanalytic lens. Her earliest works, A Life of One's Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937), are remarkable, candid accounts of her own self-enquiry, exploring character, motivation, and—all too rarely within a field committed to human flourishing—joy. Milner’s insistent focus on what gives delight to a life, as well as her willingness to draw frankly on personal material, have possibly contributed to a certain marginalization of her work with the history of twentieth-century psychoanalysis, and the relegation of her theoretical importance, relative to Winnicott, within the Independent tradition specifically.

The Marion Milner Method is by far the most elaborated and scholarly of the three works covered in this review. Across five substantive chapters, together with an introduction and conclusion, Halton-Hernandez traces the development of Milner’s autobiographical and ‘mark-making’ practices (drawing, painting, and doodling) as techniques of self-enquiry and transformation, and goes in search of Milner’s legacy and influence. The first part (‘The Milner Method’) works chronologically through Milner’s books, starting from her 1930s works, A Life of One’s Own and An Experiment in Leisure; the works that followed her qualification as an analyst, especially On Not Being Able to Paint; and later works Eternity’s Sunrise and the posthumously published Bothered by Alligators.

Milner proposes that ‘autobiographical acts […] provide an equivalent nurturing and attuning function to what object relations theorists understand the mother and analyst as providing infant and analysand’ (p. 1). That ventured equivalence lays down a challenge, or a resistance, to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, and Halton-Hernandez is relentless in exploring the paradox at the heart of Milner’s work. From the title of the first chapter onwards (‘A Life of One’s Own and the Birth of a Diary Keeping Method to Rival Psychoanalysis’), she repeatedly flags the way that Milner’s work explicitly offers an alternative to (what Milner calls) ‘couch analysis’ and the centrality of the therapeutic relationship. Milner’s books span a period of several decades both prior and subsequent to her formal training as an analyst, but even late in life we see Milner declaring unambiguously the superiority of her autobiographical method, at least insofar as it ‘democratise[d] the resources of psychoanalysis’ (p. 36), making it available to anyone, regardless of income or access to an analyst.

Her first two books, written prior to her training, coincided with her first forays into personal analysis while working as an educational and industrial psychologist. Psychoanalytic ideas were already widely established, and the idea of ‘automatic’ or ‘free’ writing was not unknown among the Surrealists and literary modernists. Milner develops her new diary-keeping style that collects the small, compelling details of a life (such as an encounter with a plant or animal, or a holiday memory) rather than an account of daily activities. Halton-Hernandez speculates how Freud, had he known of her work (it is thought he did not) might have responded to Milner’s ‘wild’ self-analysis, and finds him likely more sympathetic to ‘the lone dream analyst’ (p. 40, citing Forrester) than might be assumed. Autobiographical writing was, after all, central to Freud’s own ‘discovery’ of unconscious processes, and Halton-Hernandez wonders whether we might ‘even consider Milner’s project as an attempt at resuscitating the[se] autobiographical origins’ (p. 40).

Two key Milnerian ideas are introduced in this chapter: the ‘answering activity’, which first appears in An Experiment in Leisure, and the ‘bead memory’, at work in these early books but formulated only much later in her 1987 retrospective work, Eternity’s Sunrise. In Milner’s original formulation, the answering activity is a form of knowing,

yet a knowing that was nothing to do with me; it was a knowing that could see forwards and backwards and in a flash give form to the confusions of everyday living and to the chaos of sensation. I still felt I was being lived by something not myself, but now it seemed like something I could trust, something that knew better than I did where I was going. (Milner qtd. on p. 45)

Halton-Hernandez devotes several pages to mapping Milner’s enigmatic (and relatively neglected) account of the answering activity onto Kleinian, Bionian, and Winnicottian analogues. Drawing on Winnicott, she understands the answering activity as ‘a particular caring function that aids self-definition […] [and] a sense of self as existing across time’ (p. 49). Milner herself noted wryly that the ‘AA’ (as she referred to it) might be simply her name for ‘the good internalised object’ that she now understood from being a ‘well-trained psychoanalyst’ (p. 45). While Bion’s container-contained model and the phenomenon of rêverie come to Halton-Hernandez’s mind, Milner’s description of the ‘answering activity’ also reminds me of Bion’s ‘selected fact’, lending sudden coherence and meaning to scattered thoughts, or indeed the ‘thought without a thinker’ that, differently from Milner’s answering activity, arrives unbidden (Bion’s image, in his remarkable late essay, ‘28 May 1977’, suggests a stray or wild animal) to activate thinking.

Something of both of these is also at work in her idea of bead memories, which appear both to provoke and answer the questions of self-enquiry. Milner’s own definition is, as Halton-Hernandez reminds us, ‘characteristically enigmatic’ (p. 49), combining real objects (such as a shell collected on holiday) and remembered vignettes with a ‘particular feeling quality, a warmth or glow, that something which came in response to my asking myself the simple question, “What is the most important thing that has happened today?’’’ (Milner qtd. on p. 145). This evocative and embodied description strikingly anticipates, to my mind, the philosopher-therapist Eugene Gendlin’s later description of the ‘felt sense’, which directs transformational enquiry in his ‘focusing’ process (Gendlin, Focusing [1978]). Halton-Hernandez focuses on the way that Milner uses words, images, and objects to establish a secure sense of self: ‘these psychic objects,’ she writes, ‘gathered and recorded in diaries, are felt to helpfully provide evidence of a self—souvenirs of selfhood, if you like’ (p. 49).

Two further important ideas are introduced in Chapter 2, which turns to Milner’s later work, On Not Being Able to Paint. It is here that we see Milner beginning to work with drawing and painting (and everything that Halton-Hernandez places under the theme of ‘mark-making’) as an extension both of her own free writing and Freudian free association, and as an early adopter and developer of the play techniques introduced by Klein and others in their work with children. This chapter also explores the case of Susan, Milner’s very long-term patient who appears first as ‘Miss A.’ in a 1955 paper and then in a fuller 1968 account in The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment. One of several images included in this chapter, ‘The Post-E.C.T. drawing’ by Susan (p. 82), is especially powerful, depicting an adult who seems to hold an infant within a circular, continuous figure that makes the distinction, as Milner notes, ‘between the holder and the held’ unclear (Milner qtd. on p. 83).

Halton-Hernandez introduces Milner’s remarks on the ‘pliable [originally, pliant] medium’ that she associates especially with pencil, chalk, and paint. These mediums do not ‘stridently insist’ (p. 69) on their own nature; rather, they yield to the drawer’s will, enabling a space of unhampered creativity and illusional omnipotence. For Milner, this is of primary importance in therapy: the patient must be given the opportunity to experience primary narcissism and illusion. Milner explicitly associates the pliancy she finds in her paints and pencils with the qualities of a good mother, and also with the maximally receptive, minimally intrusive analyst. Halton-Hernandez pairs a generous reading of Milner’s views with a more critical counterpoint provided by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who describes working with less pliable and ‘compliant’ textiles that ‘press back so palpably, so reliably, against my efforts to shape them according to models I’ve conceived’, with Halton-Hernandez noting astutely that Sedgwick ‘finds relief precisely in the demands her materials make of her’ (p. 71).

On Not Being Able to Paint also introduces Milner’s important idea of the frame (later, the ‘framed gap’). As an actual frame demarcates a painting, the idea of a frame names a context or setting in which psychical and creative exploration can take place. Though the broader idea of the analytic setting—or more popularly the idea that the therapist ‘holds space’ for the patient—was not new, Milner’s insistence on its importance possibly emerges from her unsatisfactory experience of being in analysis (with Winnicott and others), and in reaction to the Kleinian tendency to annex all of life to the inner world of phantasy. It also recalls the delineation of ‘me and not me’ phenomena that, as Boyle Spelman recounts in The Marion Milner Tradition, is generally attributed to Winnicott (and his formulation of the transitional object), but likely originated with Milner (p. xxviii).

Milner’s productive but troubled relationship with Winnicott is the focus of the next chapter. In Bothered by Alligators, Milner’s last book, Halton-Hernandez finds her ‘ambivalence towards the institution and profession of psychoanalysis reaches a crescendo’; she is also ‘at her most critical of her own experiences as a psychoanalytic patient […] adamant in providing herself with her own autobiographical cures’ (p. 94). Milner contrasts the efficacy of her own techniques of free writing and drawing with the ‘couch analysis’ that she underwent with several different analysts both before and after her own training. She spent four years in analysis with Winnicott, under conditions that would nowadays strike the analytic community as unorthodox, if not unethical. Winnicott analysed Milner in her own house, and suggested she take on the analysis of a disturbed patient, Susan, who at that time actually lived with Winnicott and his wife. When subsequently the Winnicotts embarked on a separation, Milner was placed in a difficult position, choosing to end her analysis with Winnicott rather than abandon her vulnerable patient. Halton-Hernandez observes that their correspondence had at times a passionate, even romantic, quality that again placed the boundaries of the therapeutic situation in question.

Milner’s disappointment in Winnicott may also stem from his critical comments about her work, as well as the use he seems to have made of her private analytic case, anonymized but with suggestive personal detail, in a 1949 paper. In each of these, Winnicott disparaged the primary value that Milner placed on creative imagination, characterizing her diary-writing as symptom rather than cure, and as an immature, inevitably futile, attempt to establish a sense of self. Halton-Hernandez suggests that, whereas for Winnicott ‘the child must feel it exists before it can live creatively, for Milner it is through creative activity and through the creation of her autobiographical books that self is felt to be able to be found’ (p. 107). There are late traces in Milner’s work that suggest some irresolution—or at least continued enquiry—as to the efficacy of her self-help methods or whether they enabled her to avoid deeper questions around her ability and willingness to trust others—to trust in therapeutic relationship, in other words—for support. She recalls a dream in which ‘a person beside her turns to her and says “Ought you be doing it by yourself?” and in the dream Milner replies, with breezy stoicism: “Yes, that’s OK. I always do”’ (p. 113).

The two chapters that form Part II (‘The Milner Tradition’) of The Marion Milner Method examine the influence of her work. Halton-Hernandez draws a distinction between Milner’s and Freud’s very different uses of autobiography, drawing on John Forrester’s remarks on The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, argues Forrester, wrote autobiography ‘not for its own sake […] but for the pedagogical and analytic purpose of making readers into Freudians’ (qtd. on p. 124), launching an identification with Freud that also proselytizes his theory and technique. Milner’s work—more idiosyncratic and meandering—does not have this quality, and her theory is often implicit.

While we can locate Milner in terms of those writers and artists that influenced her, including Woolf, Montaigne, and especially William Blake, Halton-Hernandez also notes Milner’s resistance to setting her work in relation to that of others, perhaps out of a ‘perceived exclusion and disapproval [from the Bloomsbury group, for example] coupled with a fear that their authority might undermine her own originality’. Milner’s insistence on a ‘life of her own’ names not only her first book, but her whole project. Halton-Hernandez continues:

In observing what Milner’s works choose to remember and what they choose to forget, we find in Milner a desire to reinvent the self without reference to others. If these others have the capacity to diminish one’s identity, then they must be to some extent forgotten, ignored or rejected. (p. 125)

What did Milner’s readers think of her work? Halton-Hernandez takes us through a delightful selection of Milner’s fan mail from her archives. Women especially appreciated her candid reflections on and misgivings about marriage and motherhood, and resonated with her desire to discover authentic subjectivity. They also ventured their own variants on Milnerian ideas, such as the woman, writing in 1998, who wondered whether bead memories ‘might be another name for what I had come to call my “poppies”’ (p. 134), or another who wrote in 1987 that she was ‘beginning to find, and now find every day “beads” of my own. I call them messages or print-outs’ (p. 133). Yet others discovered Milner through her contribution to an Open University course, ‘Art and Environment’, in the mid-1970s, on which she served as programme consultant. In one exercise, called ‘Liberating Objects from their Outlines’, her influence is particularly clear, recalling as it does Milner’s own experiments in copying works by Blake, undoing the line of borders around objects.

Milner was not the first person to explore the therapeutic potential of autobiographical form, nor the last. Halton-Hernandez offers a potted account of subsequent writers who have explored life-writing in the service of personal transformation. These include Tristine Rainer, whose book about the ‘new diary’ proved a bestseller in 1978; Marlene Schiwy, whose book Voice of Her Own: Women and the Journal-Writing Journey seems directly to reference Milner; Gillie Bolton; and Celia Hunt. Surveying the contemporary self-help market, Halton-Hernandez discerns many more who are likely unaware of Milner’s oeuvre. Quoting Maud Ellmann, ‘Milner sometimes gives the impression of re-inventing the wheel’ (p. 125); her work is reinvented in its turn.

In the final chapter, ‘Milner in the Comic Frame’, Halton-Hernandez explores her legacy in relation to two graphic memoirists, Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel. Barry coins the term ‘autobiofictionagraphy’ to describe her genre of autofictional graphic or comic memoir across several works, including her 2009 book, What It Is. Namechecking Milner directly, she draws a copy of herself reading On Not Being Able to Paint within, appropriately, the framed gap of a window that is also a present tied up with bows (in an image by Barry reproduced by Halton-Hernandez on p. 152). Meanwhile Bechdel drew prominently on Winnicott (rather than Milner) to explore her own maternal relationship in the 2012 Are You My Mother? Halton-Hernandez seeks to make the case for Milner as an occluded ‘foremother’ (p. 163) in Bechdel’s work, not only in her conception of drawing as directly healing, but in her depiction of the Winnicott case study of the patient assumed to be Milner. Are You My Mother?, she argues, might therefore be read as ‘staging, unknowingly, some of this possible encounter between Winnicott and Milner. Bechdel nonetheless does knowingly stage a dialogue between the talking cure and a diary-keeping cure, and their respective ability to provide therapeutic resolution’ (p. 164).

In closing remarks, Halton-Hernandez discerns in Milner’s work a certain resistance to ‘legibility’, most evidently in her difficult handwriting which Milner herself claimed to be unable to read. Handwriting aside, both Halton-Hernandez and Milner’s biographer Emma Letley point to her early expressed wish not to be legible as evidence of a broader ‘commitment to illegibility’. Halton-Hernandez notes that while this is seemingly at odds with Milner’s project, it speaks also to her ambivalence regarding external interpretation: ‘Milner’s autobiographical cure is self-administered and self-directed: the other, and the reader, is always necessarily outside of it, a witness and not a participant in her efforts to give herself legibility’ (p. 175). The Marion Milner Method closes with a delightful short poem that Milner wrote in response to the gift of a toy airplane. She evokes a process of discovery in which she seems at first to merge with the ‘lovely toy’, describing the trail of imaginary lights that fire from the ends of her fingers:

Boyle Spelman and Raphael-Leff’s The Marion Milner Tradition similarly draws on Milner’s creativity, opening with a reproduction of a scored ditty, ‘Mind the Gap’, written by Milner in tribute to Pearl King. This extensive work gathers nearly fifty contributions from many who knew and worked with Milner or were inspired by her work. Organized into five sections, this is a fascinating, if somewhat uneven compilation of short essays, interviews, and personal recollections, which will be of interest chiefly to scholars and historians of Milner, and by those therapists, artists, and art-therapists whose own work is inspired by Milner’s rich and detailed contribution to the therapeutics of creativity. In his rapturous introduction as series editor, Aleksandar Dimitrijević suggests that there is, as yet, no ‘Milner tradition’, but that her ideas and approach offer a ‘foundational stone for what is yet to come’, citing her self-reflective approach that placed psychoanalytic thinking in the service of independent exploration of personal creativity. He suggests that it is our ‘superficiality’ (alongside the more predictable neglect of women authors) that has resulted in a tendency to see Milner as a charming but theoretically weak footnote to Winnicott. This point is taken up by Boyle Spelman, who notes that while Milner has often been read as an ‘epiphenomenon’ to Winnicott, certain ideas—ostensibly ‘Winnicottian’, such as the distinction between ‘me and not-me’, and the use of free drawing, such as Winnicott’s ‘Squiggle game’—are likely to have originated with Milner or were co-developed by Milner and Winnicott in the course of their long and complicated professional and therapeutic relationship.

One has the sense throughout of this book being a labour of love for Boyle Spelman, Raphael-Leff, and the many individuals and groups who contributed to it. Both Alberto Stefana (who also contributes to this volume) and Halton-Hernandez refer to this book, then in preparation, in their own works. The Milner Tradition includes contributions from a wide range of scholars, therapists, and artists, among them Milner’s biographer Emma Letley, Lesley Caldwell, Michael Eigen, Brett Kahr, and Juliet Mitchell, who writes of her experience with Milner as a supervisor, as does Leon Klimberg. Several contributions are by those who interviewed Milner in relation to some ‘bigger’ psychoanalytic name they were then writing about (such as Winnicott or Masud Khan; James William Anderson regrets the missed opportunity to interview Milner in her own right). Boyle Spelman elicits personal reflections in interviews with the writer Adam Phillips, Andreas Giannakoulas, and with two of Milner’s former patients turned therapists. While there is much of interest in many of these contributions (including the important historical interest of recording the recollections of those who knew her), the effect of such a crowded panoply of Milner’s admirers can, at times, be repetitious, yet it may offer others a compendium of Milnerian inspiration.

Certain papers are more substantive. The third section, on art and creativity, features several of these, including an essay about Milner’s important 1952 paper, ‘The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation’, by Lesley Caldwell, whose 2020 book Art, Creativity, Living was dedicated to Milner; and a detailed contextualization of Milner’s involvement in artistic circles by Hugh Haughton. Jennifer Scott relates Milner’s concerns to those of the artist Ben Nicholson. Maia Kirchkeli offers original and contemporary material, describing Milner as her ‘created-found companion’ during her strange experience working as a therapist during the Covid-19 lockdown, and making connections between Milner’s 1960 paper ‘The Concentration of the Body’ with her experience of ‘acoustic hyperactivity’ and exhaustion in telephone sessions, in which sound became the ‘only perceptual real, the only flesh linking an analytic dyad’ (p. 105). The theme of body concentration also appears in Stefana’s introduction to Milner’s work on creativity and art—adapted from previously published material that also appears in his co-authored A Contemporary Introduction (see below). Raphael-Leff details the context of Milner’s psychoanalytic training during the period of the ‘controversial discussions’ within the British Psychoanalytic Society. We also learn more about Milner’s early career as an educational and industrial psychologist from both Shane Graham and Boyle Spelman in two essays about Milner’s least well-known book, The Human Problem in Schools (1938). There are contributions, too, from three Milner reading groups (in Australia and South Africa), the International Winnicott Association Hellenic Group, and a final selection of personal recollections, including an interview with Milner’s grandson, Giles Milner, about the woman he called ‘Granny Plasticine’.

Stefana and Gamba’s Marion Milner: A Contemporary Introduction inevitably treads similar ground, but is lucid on certain points and more substantive in those areas where the discussion derives more idiosyncratically from the authors’ previously published work. It is not, therefore, an introductory text in the usual sense, although the concise opening summary of Milner’s life and work will be helpful for new readers. The keyword section, in particular, reflects this, organized as it is as a narrative sequence of terms (fantasy, illusion, framing, concentration, ecstasy, absentmindedness, and rêverie) that do not, for example, map relatably onto the four key terms chosen by Halton-Hernandez (the ‘answering activity’ and ‘bead memories’ do not even appear in the index of this book): some of these words might be better understood as ‘stepping stones’ towards an understanding of Milner’s work, in the context of her drift from Kleinian terrain, rather than key terminology to be abstracted from a writer whose work, in any case, largely resists this.

The first chapter (‘The Artistic Process’), drawing on Stefana’s previously published work, places Milner’s psychoanalytic reflections on borders and outlines (in drawing) in a broader artistic context that includes da Vinci’s sfumato technique, and also emphasizes the way that Milner’s use of drawing to access inner states (drawing as royal road to the unconscious, one might say) framed symbol formation as an inherently creative, rather than defensive, activity, in line with Jung’s view of ‘art as active imagination’ (p. 8). The Freudian pre-history of this debate is notably absent here (Freud also does not appear in the index): the term ‘dream-imagination’ appears six times in The Interpretation of Dreams but gives way, as Bion notes, to ‘the negative attitude, dreams as ‘concealing’ something, not the way in which the necessary dream is constructed’ (see Wynter-Vincent, 2021, for a fuller account). The second chapter, on emotional development, helpfully describes the theoretical differences between Milner and Klein in respect of symbol formation and the primary role of envy:

Having noted the infant’s need for the establishment of object relations, Milner deviated from the Kleinian view, which she saw as having a limited focus on the need for reparation. Instead she integrated a Kleinian view with the model outlined by Ernest Jones (1916), who identified the need to endow the external world with aspects of the self that make it familiar as the basis of the process of identification. (p. 32)

Chapter 4 takes up in detail Milner’s important 1952 paper, ‘Aspects of Symbolism in Comprehension of the Not-Self’ (later known as ‘The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation’), with Stefana and Gamba asserting, as does Boyle Spelman, Milner’s theoretical primacy in her formulation of the ‘me–not-me’ distinction, and describing Milner’s case study of Simon. We move from clinical practice to theory in Chapter 5, which draws on two earlier papers and Milner’s account of her patient, Susan, in The Hands of the Living God. Stefana and Gamba make a fruitful connection between Milner’s early educational work with her methodological focus on the awareness of functional inability (most notably in On Not Being Able to Paint):

the search for ‘what is missing’ or ‘what is unclear’ (from which the whole theme of accepting ‘non-knowledge’ and capacity for doubt develops) is not experienced as a state of personal uncertainty or disorientation, nor does it generate a kind of defensive tension to acquiring knowledge. Rather, it is a firm determination to give up fantasies about the supposed self-sufficiency of one’s knowledge, in order to discover what lies beyond it. (p. 77)

They also helpfully articulate the bridge between Milner’s self-help ruddy individualism and her work as a therapist by drawing out her comments on the way that the therapist becomes ‘the servant of a process that works for the patient’s self-cure’, the process of therapy itself releasing ‘self-curing forces’ (p. 92). Finally, Stefana and Gamba also devote considerable space to discussing Milner’s focus on bodily states (‘body concentration’) as a form of ‘corporeal thinking’ used by both patient and analyst. Milner writes how the ‘ongoing background or matrix of one’s own sense of being […] can yet become foreground once one has learnt the skill of directing attention to it’ (qtd. on p. 95).

3. Jews Do Count

The imbrication of personal experience with theory that Marion Milner navigates so well brings us neatly to the last of this year’s reviewed books. Stephen Frosh’s Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis offers a timely and sensitive exploration of the triangulated relationship of Jewishness (and Judaism) to psychoanalysis, antisemitism to racism, and psychoanalysis to both of these. Antisemitism and Racism works in turn through each of these contested and complex relational histories in order to articulate an antiracist psychoanalysis, built on and with specifically Judaic and Jewish ethics, concerns, and experiences.

The clarity and critical rigour of Frosh’s enquiry are much needed in the current geopolitical conflagration. It should be noted that the book was written prior to the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent ground and air invasion of occupied Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces that has, at the time of writing, claimed 38,000 lives. It is impossible, as I write this review in 2024, not to read the book in relation to this devastating backdrop: Frosh’s writing takes on renewed urgency and salience in this context and offers thoughtfulness and clarity where they are sorely needed.

Antisemitism and Racism proceeds over eight chapters focusing, in turn, on the question of psychoanalysis’s Jewishness, aspects (and stereotyping) of ‘Jewish’ thinking, the relation of antisemitism to other racisms, the varied and paradoxical figurings of both race and Jewishness within psychoanalysis, including a detailed discussion of Jewish ‘whiteness’, and two final chapters drawing on Jewish and Black decolonial and antiracist thinkers. All except two chapters reuse or adapt previously published materials. This may account for the book’s slightly holographic quality: Frosh’s thesis is both abundantly clear from the opening lines of the first chapter and endlessly elaborated from different and important angles in subsequent chapters. ‘My argument throughout this book’, Frosh writes,

is that psychoanalysis inherits and reworks some important ethical principles, derived in part from Judaism and from Jewish life (including the experience of antisemitism), and that these principles warrant an engagement with broader antiracist practices. (p. 15)

‘Let me start with my personal position’, Frosh begins, locating himself as a ‘Jewish academic, usually situated ethnically as “white”’ (p. 1), not usually subject to racialized aggression. Placing his own whiteness in quotation marks introduces a discussion of the status of Jewish ‘whiteness’—variously presumed, denied, or even essentialized—that will be taken up more fully in a later chapter. It also immediately suggests a challenge to both out-group antisemitic tropes and in-group assumptions around Jewish identity. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy, he notes that the idea of antisemitism as a ‘paradigm for other racisms’ that would figure racism as ‘universalised antisemitism’ (quoting Slavoj Žižek on p. 2) suffers from an overweening Eurocentrism that obscures the specificities of anti-Black racism. This is important, Frosh argues, within the recent context of alleged and actual antisemitism within antiracist (such as Black Lives Matter) and anti-Islamophobic movements, through the deployment—sometimes unwitting—of antisemitic tropes (e.g. in visual portrayals of the capitalist ‘enemy’), or in criticism of the Israeli state. Frosh has sympathy for a recent popular book, Jews Don’t Count, by the UK writer and comedian David Baddiel, which describes the predicament of Jewish people who find the ongoing reality (and resurgence) of antisemitism dismissed or sidelined within the left-wing politics with which they would otherwise identify. Notwithstanding these failings, Frosh is nevertheless clear-eyed in calling out ‘right-wing forces’, including the British government (under Conservative Party rule over the last decade), that have enabled racist expression under the guise of defending free speech, while defunding antiracist and decolonizing initiatives within public institutions. The freedom to speak critically to power has been paradoxically suppressed in relation to some topics but not others, and the conflation of criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Zionism and, in turn, with antisemitism has resulted in suspicions of bad faith and weakened solidarity within progressive circles. Frosh notes the way that

universities are compelled to sign up to an impoverished and confused agenda in which anti-Zionism is merged with antisemitism and ‘free speech’ actually gets restricted. To be clear, if possible, I am not saying here that anti-Zionism is never antisemitic or that antisemites should be allowed free rein to say what they like; rather, I am pointing to a situation in which on both left and right, antisemitism is becoming separated from anti-Black and other forms of racism with negative effects on the potential for solidarity between those who suffer either—or both. (p. 3)

Solidarity between those who experience different forms of prejudice is not, for Frosh, a naive political project that too readily presumes equivalences between different kinds of lived experience. Indeed, it is psychoanalysis, in its techniques, that offers a model for the kinds of deep listening and enquiry that make solidarity possible. ‘It is probably obvious’, Frosh writes, ‘that a white person cannot know from the inside what Black experience is, or indeed that a non-Jew cannot fully know what it is about Jewish life that is distinctive and emotionally powerful; lived experience is particular to those who live it. But we can know something, maybe a lot, by encountering others in what they write and say’ (p. 4). Likewise, Frosh is clear in his criticism of a certain apolitical conception of psychoanalysis that would attribute almost all felt experience to an individual’s subjective internal world, and resist any interpretation that makes connections to broader societal realities, material conditions, and the transgenerational legacy of trauma—be that the history of slavery or the Shoah.

This is a discussion that he picks up again in his final chapter, ‘Psychoanalysis in the Wake’, in which he discusses Christina Sharpe’s remarkable 2016 book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Frosh explores Sharpe’s rich account of Black experience through the polysemous resonances of Sharpe’s keyword, wake: to be ‘in the wake’ conjures not only the slave ships that brought Africans to the Americas, but the ever-expanding turbulence—‘ripple’ hardly seems the right word here—of that trauma across subsequent generations. The wake also recalls the word ‘woke’—the awakening of white people to the effects of systemic racism, and their privileged place within it—recently demonized within populist right-wing circles.

The figure of the wake describes a turmoil that affects everyone—albeit in different ways. Frosh’s contention is that Jewishness—both religiously and experientially—can and should catalyse an alliance with antiracist movements, both through the shared experiences of antisemitism and anti-Black racism (the important specific case of Islamophobia is somewhat elided in Frosh’s account, and merited greater consideration) and—drawing on Levinas’s ethical account—a relational responsibility of each person and group to the other. Everyone is touched by the wake. Levinas, of course, draws explicitly on Jewish—specifically Talmudic—thinking to develop an account of subjectivity actualized in the moment of encounter with the other. The complexity of Levinas’s position is the focus of the second chapter of Antisemitism and Racism. Frosh considers the thorny question of alleged and actual Jewish ‘insularity’ and the way that this is forcibly challenged by the tradition in Judaic scholarship to explore particularist and creative readings of sacred texts. Like psychoanalysis, Jewish theology makes space for ‘resistant readings’ that may challenge established accounts of, for example, Jewish exceptionalism under the guise of ‘chosenness’. The important Jewish and Lurianic principle of tikkun olam, usually translated as ‘healing the world’, is shown both to challenge the insularity of certain Jewish communities and to reinstate the idea of exceptionalism via an assumed responsibility to lead by example.

Frosh examines the case for the ‘Jewishness’ of psychoanalysis across several chapters. It is perfectly possible, he argues, to trace non-Jewish elements within the development of psychoanalysis, such as occult spiritualism, Romanticism, and nineteenth-century natural science, and equally easy to overstate incidental similarities between, say, tikkun olam and the idea of reparation (which was, after all, formulated by Melanie Klein, not Freud). As is well known, Freud’s own relationship to Jewishness was complicated. Avowedly atheistic, he nevertheless recognized his Jewish lineage in the example, explored by Frosh, of his 1926 reply to the Jewish council of the B’nai B’rith. Moreover, he could not but be aware of his Jewishness, late in life, under the terrifying conditions of encroaching Nazism. Yet in other places, notably The Future of an Illusion, Freud tends to elide the specificity of Judaism within the portmanteau of Judaeo-Christian ‘religion’, tout court. Yet Frosh recalls Jacqueline Rose’s commentary on Freud’s curious insistence on an irreducible residue of his Jewishness despite disavowing any particular Jewish belief, tradition, or practice. Rose notes that ‘shedding the trappings of linguistic, religious and national identity […] does not make him less Jewish, but more’ (qtd. on p. 20). Frosh considers this paradoxical ‘“more Jewish” status’ as it produces a particular commitment to a universalist ethics that fits well with the individualist/humanist focus of classical psychoanalysis. He notes wryly that

To claim certain aspects of Judaism as mobilizing ethical thought is fine and there is no reason to avoid doing this, as Judaism is capacious enough to offer powerful guidelines for living. But to argue for an intrinsic link between Judaism and psychoanalytic ethics is a more difficult thing to do. Nevertheless […] I am going to make an attempt at it[.] (p. 21)

One basis for such a connection lies in the ‘Jewish emphasis on textual study and hermeneutics’ (p. 24) and the way that this privileges reading texts—and by analogy, people—against the grain of their surface presentation, producing close readings and depth psychology. Frosh sees an affinity between the Talmudic equivalence of ‘saving a single life’ with ‘saving the world’ and psychoanalysis’s unrelenting attention to the individual. Even more important, Frosh argues, is the tendency in both psychoanalysis and Judaism to ‘see the human subject as incomplete in itself because it is fundamentally interrupted by otherness’ (p. 27), an argument that reprises Levinas’s insistence on relationality as constitutive of individual subjectivity and subjecthood.

In Chapter 3, ‘Psychoanalysis as Decolonial Judaism’, Frosh contends with the ‘rather tired trope in which Jewish intellectualism stands in for radical thinking’ while attempting to examine the idea that antisemitism can stand in for, or offer the template for, other racisms. Positioned as ‘the enemy within’, embodying difference and degeneracy, the Jew is subject to a foundational ‘othering’ within antisemitism that (in a contested reading) historically antedates anti-Black and other racisms. Unwilling to lean too hard on this idea (and musing the while on whether his own reticence reveals a strain of his own internalized antisemitism), Frosh draws on Frantz Fanon’s simpler assertion that ‘the anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro’ (p. 56). But he also acknowledges the difficulties of asserting a straightforward equivalence of antisemitism and decolonizing, anti-Black racism. How one understands the political and spiritual project of Zionism, the founding of Israel, and the historical and current policies of the Israeli state—and, moreover, how one relates any of this to the tenets of Judaism or the lived experience of Jewish people—also shapes an ability or willingness to foreground antisemitism within the broader antiracist movement. Does psychoanalysis—if it can be understood as ‘decolonial Judaism’—offer a way back in?

Frosh traces the radical element within psychoanalysis that seems to bespeak the Jewish experience (certainly during Freud’s lifetime)—of relegation, exclusion, and suspicion—in its critical theorizations of civilization and sexual normalcy. Psychoanalysis makes space, Frosh suggests, for a profoundly decolonial, emancipatory conception of the human, notwithstanding, as he must acknowledge, its recurrent institutional miring in political and cultural conservatism. He reminds us that ‘obviously, I am siding with the radical element in psychoanalysis, its capacity to remain at odds with the normatively oppressive values of colonialism’ (p. 71). He offers examples of decolonial and antiracist writers who call out Freud’s racism—apparent in a racist joke recounted by Claudia Tate, and more latent in his persistent characterization of ‘primitive races’—in work that ‘claims a legitimate basis for Black hostility towards psychoanalysis even as it consciously employs psychoanalytic methods in its analysis’ (p. 101). Others, such as Daniel Gaztambide, use such examples to defend the Afropessimist view that the shared experience of racialized oppression does not necessarily lead to empathic solidarity between different groups.

Frosh returns to the question of Jewish whiteness in Chapter 6, ‘Whiteness with Jewishness’. Just as the concept of ‘political Blackness’ expands the definition of Blackness to include, potentially, all those subject to racialized exclusion (regardless of actual skin colour or ethnicity), a corresponding theorization of ‘whiteness’ has emerged in recent years. The field of critical whiteness studies attempts to describe the salient political features and phantasied construction of whiteness as ‘the taken-for-granted base from which the aberrant other departs’ (p. 124). The positioning of Jews within this systemic binary proves complicated. In Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel humorously describes ‘the law of Schrödinger’s Whites […] in which Jews are white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer’ (p. 121), with Jewishness sometimes signifying ‘even greater whiteness than normal’ in certain contexts. The characterization of white capitalist power associated with unaccountable global elites readily activates age-old antisemitic tropes associating Jews with money, emerging both in left-wing anticapitalism and right-wing ‘replacement theory’ (with Caucasian Jews portrayed within this discourse as an ‘exemplary’ deracinated group that threatens white nationalism). What is needed, Frosh argues, is an intersectional account within critical whiteness studies that would explore the contradictions and complexity of Jewish history and identity:

The absence of this critical intersectionality in relation to whiteness and Jewishness, however, means that instead of ameliorating the assumption of white privilege in relation to Jews, there is an escalation of whiteness by virtue of it being attached to Jewishness as a magnifier. That is, whiteness plus Jewishness equals more whiteness, or perhaps even Jewishness as the epitome of whiteness—a formula that shades into antisemitism. (p. 125)

Alongside the relational ethics that Levinas draws from Judaism, Frosh argues that the historical Jewish experience of exclusion, diaspora, and marginalization grounds an antiracism inherent to Jewish identity. He recalls the oft-quoted line from Exodus (‘for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Israel’) as a ‘model for Jewish attitudes towards outsiders’, though also noting, a little reluctantly, how this is ‘constrained by the insularity of many Jewish communities—fuelled largely by antisemitism […] and, at times, it has to be said, a reading of the notion of being a “chosen people” as implying superiority’ (p. 133). The difficulties of these contradictions are worked through more fully in the subsequent chapter (‘Being Ill At Ease’) in which Frosh turns to the writing of the decolonial Jewish activist Albert Memmi.

In his autobiographical novel The Pillar of Salt, Memmi described his own position as a ‘decolonial Jew in the colony’ (p. 162): Tunisian but culturally French, irreligiously Jewish (but bearing the linguistic and ethnic markers of a group distinct from the local Muslim community), associated with the colonizing power yet a second-class citizen within it, fervently decolonial but viewed with suspicion by Tunisian nationalists. Recognizing these contradictions, Memmi argued that there are finally only two political positions: ‘either one accepts all the suffering or one rejects it all’ (p. 147), opting for the rejection of oppression ‘in totum’. The complexities of Jewish identity—the long history of antisemitism, an ambiguous and contested relationship to ‘whiteness’, and the conflicting trends towards both universalism and insularity—cannot be finally resolved, but they can, for Frosh, be overcome as a commitment of political will. Reprising Memmi’s powerful statement at the close of Chapter 7, Frosh throws in his Jewish lot with antiracist and decolonial politics:

There are, in short, two attitudes: either one accepts all the suffering or one rejects it all. Well, I reject it in totum as I reject in detail each face of oppression. Both are needed: the rejection of each specific oppression, including antisemitism, and the rejection of all oppression ‘in totum’. (p. 164)

Books Reviewed

References