I am impressed not only with the reach of Szajnberg’s project but also with the exquisite sophistication of his language. His goal is to use the 'Western' tradition to place psychoanalysis in a much more complex cultural frame than has yet to be undertaken. Using Auerbach as his Vergil, he plumbs a number to texts, from the Bible(s) to his old teacher Saul Bellow. The stops along the way, Dante, Shakespeare, Rousseau, are paralleled to outliers from Ovid to Maimonides to global fairy tales. This makes the reading not only a pleasure but a sort of adventure, as he is able to link all of these moments with their cultural claims as well as their universal approbation. Rather than being disjointed, such an approach serves to anchor his argument in both the Western cultural tradition as well as in the most engaging for of psychoanalytic speculation.

Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

This book is a sweeping study of how we developed concepts of soul-psyche over some twenty-five hundred years in the West. Starting with the Bible and Homer, Nathan Szajnberg follows Auerbach's 'Mimesis' to study literature across time, depicting how we built our current understanding of inner life. From the birth of the Ego Ideal in the Joseph story, the generative emotional life in the Bible, through Homer to the present. This work spans Shakespeare's 'invention of the human,' including self-reflective asides of Cordelia, Edmund and Prospero's last words and moves from 'high style' elegance to the mundane in Flaubert and Bellow. A breathtaking journey, like Odysseus or Aeneas, deepening our sense and feeling for the human journey.

Michael Eigen, author of The Challenge of Being Human

Nathan Szajnberg is a polymath, distinguished psychoanalyst, child development researcher, and accomplished novelist and essayist. His book explores the tension between cultural specificity and the yearning for what is common in humankind. This 2,500-year survey of representations of inner life in Western literature and mind is an awesome undertaking, a tour de force… We are all very fortunate that he shares his knowledge with us.

Arnold Richards, former editor of Journal of American Psychoanalytic