Recent accounts of the seduction theory and the question of its abandonment have emphasized the continuity of Freud's work before and after the seduction theory, claiming that Freud did not abandon his concern with the event of seduction but rather came to appreciate that an understanding of fantasy was also essential. This claim is challenged. It is shown that Freud did abandon the passionate concerns of his seduction theory for the most part; that he left behind his early interest in reconstructing unconscious infantile incest and focused instead on later, conscious seduction; that he at times clearly reduced apparent paternal incest to fantasy; that he turned away from the phenomenology of incest he had begun to develop; and that he theoretically nullified the value of the difference between real and fantasied seduction. It is also shown that, contrary to a persistent concern in psychoanalytic history, attention to actual seduction need not detract from the essential psychoanalytic concern with fantasy and infantile sexuality. Thinking about incest specifically illuminates the capacity for fantasizing, the core of the Freudian psyche. In this way the intuition of the seduction theory that there is something of distinctive psychoanalytic significance about incest finds support.

Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905a,b) is well recognized for making psychoanalytic history. In the Dora paper Freud first publicized a new theory of the etiology of neurosis that made fantasy and repression central. And yet the paper also refers to trauma and seduction. What role do they play in the text? Part 1 shows that this is not a case of Freud broadening his etiological framework by adding a new focus to older ones. Rather, the references to trauma and seduction in Dora need to be understood in two ways. First, there is in the 1905 paper an implicit theoretical autobiography, of which Freud's references to the trauma and seduction theories early in the paper are part. Second, Freud's reference to seduction later in the paper constitutes Freud's first public critique of the seduction theory. The Dora paper is the actual site of the abandonment of the seduction theory. In Part 2 the focus shifts to the text's "theoretical unconscious." Despite its rejection of the seduction theory in its avowed theorizing, the text is haunted by displaced signifiers of the theory. This suggests that Freud was unconsciously conflicted about not applying the insights of the seduction theory to Dora.

Freud's "The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" is regarded by Freud and by analytic readers and commentators as a prototype of his conception of the oedipus complex. A literary methodology is used to show that the interpretation of the oedipus complex at work in Freud's text in fact differs from Freud's standard view of it. While studying the paper as text, not as case report, may obscure or distort some clinical matters, it is valuable in that it makes legible a sort of theoretical unconscious in the text. In contrast to Freud's typically tragic view of the oedipus complex (in the tradition of ancient Greek tragedy), the Hans study evokes a comic vision (in the tradition of Greek New Comedy). This comic vision allows Hans a happy imaginative ending to the oedipal dilemma, challenges certain epistemic pretensions, and emphasizes the oedipus complex as a set of abiding existential questions. Given the deep link between Freud"s oedipus concept and a tragic view of human life, this departure in the Hans paper is a fascinating anomaly.

Donnel Stern, to highlight what is well known, is one of the founding, significant voices of relational psychoanalysis, that movement in psychoanalysis that organizes itself around the recognition that what happens in an analysis-what is possible, what is ruled out, what goes well, what goes wrong, what is said, what remains implicit-is a function of the relationship between analyst and analysand. Stern's 2003 monograph, Unformulated Experience, is bound to be a classic in the relational literature. His new book, Partners in Thought, gathers together a subsequent set of papers. It carries forward from the earlier work the elaboration of the relational model and the core idea of unconscious experience as unformulated experience.What it adds is the theme of the relationship between dissociation and enactment. As a set of essays, the book does not develop an argument gradually over the course of its chapters but is instead, as its author describes it, "a collection of various approaches to the relationship of dissociation and enactment" (p. xiii).The sort of bare-bones theoretical argument that can be gleaned from the book is as follows: The unconscious is not constituted by formed and then repressed meanings. Rather, the unconscious is unformulated experience; unformulated experience is dissociated experience; dissociated experience is potential experience, experience that has not been actualized, that has never been symbolized. Certain sectors of a particular person's experience may be strongly defensively dissociated. These are "not-me," in the idiom Stern adopts from Harry Stack Sullivan. Not-me is what a subject cannot tolerate, cannot bear to find in him-or herself.The threat is such that the subject refuses to allow formulation of these possibilities. When what is dissociated threatens to become conscious, the result, in treatment (and out, one assumes), is enactment. Enactment is the interpersonalization of dissociation (p. 14). It functions to insist, "It is not that I am x" by insisting that "It is that you are y," where x and y are somehow complementary. In a mutual enactment, analyst and patient are reciprocally engaged in versions of this. The "various approaches" from which this argument emerges in different chapters include its grounding in Gadamerian hermeneutics, the resolution of enactment as the achievement of conscious conflict, the importance of narrative, the function of