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Psychoanalysis occupies an ambiguous position in our culture. At the very moment when it is beleaguered and disenfranchised—with declining enrollments in its institutions and decreasing cultural prestige—psychoanalysis actually possesses unparalleled resources for illuminating many of the problems that besiege us, ranging from wanton violence to unconscionable greed and hard-heartedness.
In the face of the waning status of psychoanalysis, all too many analysts are ironically unpsychoanalytic—looking outward rather than inward—bemoaning the quick fix, anti-introspective cultural climate, managed care, the pharmaceutical industry, and the internet. But many of the problems in psychoanalysis are of its own making. There has been a tension in psychoanalytic theory, institutions, and practice between seeing and not-seeing—the wish-to-know and the-wish-not-to-know. “The blindness of the seeing eye” that Freud admitted he was afflicted by has perhaps haunted many of us (Breuer and Freud, 1895). Psychoanalysts are frequently overinvested in antiquated formulations and divided into polarized “schools,” each tending to adopt a rigid and universalized theory. They are also prone to resist creative thinking and pathologize and marginalize dissident thinkers. All of this unwittingly undermines psychoanalysis' own emancipatory potential (Rubin, 1998).
Toward an Emancipatory Psychoanalysis, the collected papers of the late Bernard Brandchaft, ably edited and usefully introduced by Dorienne Sorter and Shelly Doctors, is a reminder of the liberating potential of psychoanalysis, a treasure trove of clinical insights, and consequently a magnificent gift to the field.
Brandchaft was a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and a founding member of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. He co-authored numerous articles and books (with George Atwood