I’d like to thank my colleagues, Lisabeth During, Patricia Gherovici, Ben Kafka, Danny Kaiser, Todd Kesselman, Renata Salecl, and Marc Strauss, for a generous and lasting intellectual friendship. Danny Kaiser deserves credit for introducing me to Adorno over a decade ago. If he hadn’t also demonstrated the power of language in Shakespeare, Melville, and Joyce, I might have stayed an Adornian. As well, my gratitude to the inimitable Judith Butler.
I’d like to thank my fellow psychoanalysts without whom I couldn’t balance the work of writing about analysis in the midst of practicing it: Nuar Alsadir, Howard Bliwise, Inga Blom, Will Braun, Rachel Gorman, Tehela Nimroody, Vanessa Sinclair; and Helen Zimmer for watching over all of us. A special thanks to Michael Garfinkle, whose commitment as a psychoanalyst has been a continued point of light during the darkest moments of training.
To Norbert Freedman—I will always hear you saying “hello kiddo”— your work on symbolization has provided a much needed bridge between American and French psychoanalysis. I’d like to thank my senior colleagues at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute: Francis Baudry, John Crow, Leon Hoffman, Donald Marcuse, Wendy Olesker, and Herb Wyman.
The dedication of my original dissertation committee deserves recognition: Elliot Jurist, David Lichtenstein, Angelica Nuzzo, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Lissa Weinstein. I’d like to thank Lissa for offering me freedom with the humility fitting the best of psychoanalysts and supervisors, and Jean-Michel for his rigor, which has helped me think through the problems and merits of my work. I’d like to express an almost inexpressible indebtedness to David Lichtenstein whose grace as a psychoanalyst has been intrinsic to finding anything of my own. That he knows this and I need not say it is one part of what makes this debt so invaluable, like the rare gift of silence from a psychoanalyst.
Last but most—my love and gratitude to my family for enduring with me through this book, especially my son Soren whose patience with me I have been in awe of since the day he was born. To my husband, Simon Critchley—how strange it is to think about the turn my life made all those years ago when you asked Alain “What’s up with the math, dude?” in homage to a little conversation between us. This book is inseparable from an encounter with you, with the deepest admiration for the courage of your work and unrelenting passion. I hope that it lives up to you, to what you have given to me. Thank you for making intellectual life such a seamless part of the psychopathology of our everyday life together.