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Psychoanalysis at the Margins chronicles the decline and fall of psychoanalysis in America over the last half century in a way no book has done before. Stepansky is uniquely suited to this task, for he is both an insider, having been, for over twenty years, the publisher and editor-in-chief at The Analytic Press, the imprint for a great number of seminal texts. In the 1980s, he worked with a number of analysts who began the move away from classical Freudianism, including John Gedo, Merton Gill, Irwin Hoffman, and Margaret Mahler. He was involved with the key figures who developed self psychology: Heinz Kohut himself, Arnold Goldberg, and Paul and Marianne Tolpin. Later, he published books by the best known contemporary psychoanalysts: Lewis Aron, Philip Bromberg, Karen Maroda, Stephen Mitchell, Donnel Stern, Robert Stolorow and his colleagues, and others, and was directly involved in the creation and publication of the influential journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
At the same time, he is an outsider, not a therapist or psychoanalyst himself, but a brilliant intellectual historian with special expertise in the history of medicine. He draws on this rich background to describe the current state of psychoanalysis, as well as to offer explanations that illuminate how the field arrived at its present dilemma. Psychoanalysts, as Stepansky notes, have been largely uninterested in their history, which has condemned them to make the same mistakes again and again, a failing that this book could do much to remedy.
The first part of Psychoanalysis at the Margins describes, in great detail, the death of psychoanalytic publishing. Following the Second World War, psychoanalysts, building on the work of psychiatrists during the War, rose to positions of great prominence and prestige. They dominated departments of psychiatry, and books by such authors as Karl Menninger—and the Neo-Freudians Karen Horney, Erik Erikson, and Harry Stack Sullivan—sold hundreds of thousands of copies, or, i