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Before I had actually read Paul Stepansky's Psychoanalysis at the Margins, I knew that I wanted to review it, having the hope of supporting the “rumor” option of my own Death of Psychoanalysis: Murder, Suicide or Rumor Greatly Exaggerated (Prince, 1999). Unfortunately, after being wowed by Stepansky's breath of knowledge and insights, I found myself unable to get the review written. My book had been a featured selection of its publisher's behavioral science book club and Stepansky enters his subject, the future of psychoanalysis, from the perspectives of the vicissitudes of psychoanalytic publishing, so it was natural to reflect on my inhibition as an enactment of themes of identification to say nothing of my own tangled feelings as a contemporary psychoanalyst coming close in age to the teachers who inspired me and wondering about the legacy I would leave. I was, however, only able to start writing when a friend observed that in our culture it is unseemly to critique a eulogy.
Stepansky's major theme is the fractionation of psychoanalysis leading to its failures as a discipline. He critiques attempts at restoring it, and proposes his own program for its rescue from the vantage of having been the editor of many influential contemporary psychoanalytic writers in his role as Managing Director of The Analytic Press from 1984 to 2005 when it closed its doors, an event that dwarfs the remaindering of my own lonely volume only a short time after its book club selection because the cost of storing it exceeded the publisher's anticipated sales. My distress at the fate of my little book is on my sleeve, Stepansky's feelings about the demise of his distinguished house—and his contribution as midwife to many great psychoanalytic books of the last era, is woven between the lines—perhaps not to unlike the undercurrents of mourning and deep narcissistic injury that characterizes psychoanalysts today.
Psychoanalysis at the Margins, scholar