The Bonds of Love: Looking Backward

Abstract

In giving this brief account of the development of and influences on the book I hope to make it possible to see its location in a particular moment of not only psychoanalytic history but also the social and intellectual history of my generation. I delineate the influence of specific individuals, but more important, the way in which I was located in a number of transformational movements and disciplinary currents: the German student movement and the critical social theory it embraced, feminism and its particular way of revising psychoanalysis, infancy research and the transformations it brought to psychoanalysis, relational analysis and the changes in clinical practice. I also try to give some sense of the direction in which the book pointed me, where I see the main continuities with current thinking. Inasmuch as The Bonds of Love (1988) was an effort to bring together all these currents to think about a specific set of problems, it seemed right to me to mainly fill in the story of those tributaries and leave others to carry forward their own thinking about those problems in light of the present.

Notes

¹I have written in more detail about Andy Rabinbach's influence on my work in “Andy Rabinbach as the Inspiration for a Work of Feminist Theory” in New German Critique (2012).