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When psychoanalysts think of history, it is usually in reference to the personal developmental narrative of an individual patient's life. Psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline has kept a focus on the patient's inner life both in terms of how he or she has developed mental and emotional capacities, or failed to do so. As such, there is little in the formal psychoanalytic literature that relates to the nature of the society in which the unfolding of any individual's emotional life occurs. Even more significant is the absence of a psychoanalytic perspective on the history of societies and how they have come to develop a profile of values in the political and personal arenas.
Despite ample examples of the incompatibility of totalitarian governments and psychoanalysis we remain, as a profession, relatively passive and unappreciative recipients of benefits that depend upon our living in nations with progressive democratic governments. We live in an atmosphere where the freedom to practice psychoanalysis is unquestioned by any authoritarian government and yet we have little in the way of understanding the history that lies behind the tolerant and increasingly humane society that we live in and depend upon. Beyond this we as psychoanalysts often are unaware of the persistent political forces that are determined to defeat the freedom of thought and activity that have become the hallmark of our lives as a result of changes in social values that have increasingly dominated our society in the past 50 years.
The opportunity to review this unusual book with its challenging title, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance & Democracy's Future, by Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards forced me to overcome my resistance to reading what at first glance appears like a somewhat dry, intellectual exercise by two academics, one a developmental psychologist and the other a constitutional lawyer. The rewards of plunging into this volume with its 33 pages of footnotes and 21 pages o