Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change: Spiritual Globalization, by Neil Altman,  Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, 2015,  140pp.

Neil Altman's deep concern for an enlarged role for psychoanalysis, well beyond the walls of private practice—whether as nearby as at a hospital clinic in the South Bronx or as far afield as in Portugal and Chile—is widely evident in this his third book. Here he spotlights two interconnected themes: the psychoanalytic profession's dearth of cultural competence within a reassembling world order and its collective blindness to how radical socio-economic developments are having direct and indirect negative impingements on the already diminished access to mental healthcare around the world.

It is not a novel idea that each member of a therapeutic dyad responds both intrapsychically and intersubjectively to their differences in cultural worldview. Many urban psychoanalytic institutes work in tandem with clinics and immerse candidates in the multicultural implications of psychotherapy with diverse populations. While to varying degrees, each of us retains and uses this early training and sensitivity in private practice settings, Altman points out how many psychotherapists, across theoretical perspectives, and consciously or not, perpetuate the elitism and isolation of the classical frame.

He raises Erich Fromm's culturalist banner as he reports on his experiences while teaching at New Delhi's Ambedhar University. But this volume is not a sociological travelogue; Altman is sounding a clarion call for greater awareness of the ways in which psychoanalysis, community-based work and culture can conceptually and actively overlap, during an era when the global public square is shaken by tectonic political and economic shifts.

Altman builds our attention to this sense of urgency about these matters by layering his findings in tiers, wedding cake-like, so that ethical and economic anxieties are provoked and a greater moral and intellectual awareness is restimulated, at least it was convincingly so for me. Current events feel more experience near as the book's passion evokes a keener f