Objects Of Love And Regret

Acclaimed historian and museum curator Richard Rabinowitz tells the story of his immigrant Jewish family through the everyday objects in their lives, from chairs and bottle openers to bottles of perfume. Vivid, absorbing, and powerfully honest, this is a story of one family and one community but also of emotional touchstones that anchor us all.

An award-winning historian and museum curator tells the story of his Jewish immigrant family by lovingly reconstructing its dramatic encounters with the memory-filled objects of ordinary life. At a pushcart stall in East New York, Brooklyn, in the spring of 1934, eighteen-year-old Sarah Schwartz bought her mother, Shenka, a green, wooden-handled bottle opener. Decades later, Sarah would tear up telling her son Richard, “Your bubbe always worked so hard. Twenty cents, it cost me.” How could that unremarkable item, and others like it, reveal the untold history of a Jewish immigrant family, their chances and their choices over the course of an eventful century? By unearthing the personal meaning and historical significance of simple everyday objects, Richard Rabinowitz offers an intimate portrait connecting Sarah, Shenka, and the rest of his family to the twentieth-century transformations of American life. During the Depression, Sarah—born on a Polish battlefield in World War I, scarred by pogroms, pressed too early into adult responsibilities—receives a gift of French perfume, her fiancé Dave’s response to the stigma of poverty. Later we watch Dave load folding chairs into his car for a state-park outing, signaling both the postwar detachment from city life and his own escape from failures to be a good “provider” for those he loves. Objects of Love and Regret is closely wedded to the lives of American Jewish immigrants and their children, yet Rabinowitz invites all of us to contemplate the material world that anchors our own memories. Beautifully written, absorbing, and emotionally vivid, this is a memoir that brings us back to the striving, the dreams, the successes, and the tragedies that are part of every family’s story.

This book provides a study of regret in the moral psychology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Warren provides a detailed account of their views on the nature of this emotion, as related to their understanding of virtue and ethical knowledge and development.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.

My purpose in this book is to re-interpret the philosophy of Spinoza to a new generation. I make no attempt to compete with the historical scholar ship of A. H. Wolfson in tracing back Spinoza's ideas to his Ancient, Hebrew and Mediaeval forerunners, or the meticulous philosophical scrutiny of Harold Joachim, which I could wish to emulate but cannot hope to rival. I have simply relied upon the text of Spinoza's own writings in an effort to grasp and to make intelligible to others the precise meaning of his doctrine, and to decide whether, in spite of numerous apparent and serious internal conflicts, it can be understood as a consistent whole. In so doing I have found it necessary to correct what seem to me t0' be mis conceptions frequently entertained by commentators. Whether or not I am right in my re-interpretation, it will, I hope, contribute something fresh, if not to the knowledge of Spinoza, at least to the discussion of what he really meant to say. The limits within which I am constrained to write prevent me from drawing fully upon the great mass of scholarly writings on Spinoza, his life and times, his works and his philosophical ideas. I can only try to make amends for omissions by listing the most important works in the Spinoza bibliography, for reference by those who would seek to know more about his philosophy. This list I have added as an appendix.