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Defining Psychoanalysis: Achieving a Vernacular Expression

Author(s) : Ian Miller

Reviews and Endorsements

‘In this innovative, intelligent and explorative book, Ian Miller solves a mystery I have been haunted by for years: how analysts in the twenty first century use texts that were written decades ago. The book provides a masterful theory — a deep understanding of the “vernacular psychoanalytic”, a term I believe should be used widely whenever one wants to understand how analysts use and practise their theories.’
— Aner Govrin, author of Conservative and Radical Perspectives on Psychoanalytic Knowledge: The Fascinated and the Disenchanted

‘Ian Miller makes the case that every generation, by re-reading and re-understanding the work of writers who have come before, constructs its own “vernacular psychoanalysis”. Our contemporary reading, Miller tells us, is a retranscription that represents a discovery of new (and newly relevant) meanings in old sources, just as we discover new significances in our own pasts over the course of life, and in treatment. He illustrates his argument by considering five of the ten articles — three by Winnicott, two by Bion — that were most widely read on PEP in the year 2014–2015. It is impossible for me to say which is more interesting: the innovative way Miller has constructed his argument, or the deep and thoughtful argument itself.’
— Donnel Stern, author of Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis and Partners in Thought: Working With Unformulated Experience, Dissociation, and Enactment

‘Defining Psychoanalysis is a good starting place for discerning the clinical landscape shared among psychoanalytic practitioners of all varieties in our contemporary world. This voyage of discovery for a vernacular language for psychoanalysis produces a valuable map, indicating five major landmark texts between its origins and the Babel of today.’
— Toni O’Brien Johnson, Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, from the Foreword