Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the love, support, generosity, critical acumen, and colleagueship of my wife, Kathe Hift, who has always somehow managed to help me find the time to write and has herself found the time to read and comment on what I have written. I am especially grateful to my editor, Stephen Mitchell, whose thoughtful suggestions, emendations, and additions made the book much better than it would have been without him. Philip Cushman, Robert Gaines, and Emmanuel Kaftal all read the final manuscript more than once, and each saw crucial problems and thought of ways to improve the manuscript that would never have occurred to me. I am grateful for their friendship. Muriel Dimen, Adrienne Harris, Lawrence Jacobson, and Emmanuel Kaftal read substantial parts of an earlier draft and helped me to adopt a different and fruitful direction. Our regular discussions have broadened my awareness of the literature, stretched my appreciation of the intellectual scope of psychoanalysis, and deepened my grasp of psychoanalysis as a moral and political enterprise. Conversations with Louis Fourcher and Irwin Hoffman have always enriched my thinking and kept me mindful of the clinical and theoretical problems that attend linguistic relativism. I am especially grateful for Louis Fourcher's generous and appreciative criticism, without which I would not have devoted sufficient attention to the ways in which even unformulated experience has structured aspects. I thank Allan Cooper for many things, perhaps most for his encouragement. I also thank Barry Protter for his help in guiding me into the literature of hermeneutics at a time, years ago, when I had an interest but did not know where or how to begin. From years before that, I thank my first and most important teacher in graduate school, Joseph Reyher, whose passion for the work of Freud and Sullivan sparked my own. And finally, at The Analytic Press, I thank Nancy Liguori for her reliability, good cheer, and command of detail.