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Without being a classical drive-theory Freudian, an ego or self psychologist, or a Lacanian, John O’Neill writes a book on Freud called The Domestic Economy of the Soul. One could perhaps place O’Neill’s theoretical framework among those of the object-relations analysts of the 1920’s and 1930’s. These analysts believed, as does O’Neill, that psychic life takes its shape from the mother’s body and being. The beauty of O’Neill’s book does not lie in its theoretical framework, however, but within his attention to detail.

The pleasure of reading O’Neill lies in his encounter with Freud as an unruly writer, rather than solely as a theorist of the sexual body or therapist of mental suffering. He shows us how the resistance of the patient’s desire to the power of the analyst is reflected and refracted in the struggle of readers with the texts of the five case histories. O’Neill’s symptomatic readings of an impressive range of clinical and critical literature expose how the scientific ambitions of psychoanalysis cannot be separated from its family romances and its civilizing mythologies.