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I would venture to say that Daniel Gaztambide’s 2019 book, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, can already be called a classic. It is an exceptional piece of scholarship that brings to light much of psychoanalytic history that has been lost, ignored, and pushed into the darkness. A core element of the psychoanalytic process involves looking for and probing into gaps and omissions in the patient’s narrative. At a larger scale, then, we need to probe into what has been omitted from our psychoanalytic history and ask how this has occurred and how reintegrating this lost history can impact psychoanalysis today.
The goals of this book include the following: (1) to explore significant omissions in the history of psychoanalysis, (2) to demonstrate how psychoanalysis and liberation psychology are interconnected, (3) to have psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training programs become more inclusive of those psychoanalysts, educators, psychologists, and novelists examined in this book, and (4) to further our thinking around the impact of systemic racism and economic disparity that plagues the world in contemporary times. These goals are all achieved.
In the Preface, Gaztambide writes about an incident where he found himself on a ladder in a NYC bookstore and noticed a book entitled, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918-1938, by Elizabeth Danto (Danto, 2005). Gaztambide at the time did not know how to connect Freud to social justice, so he bought it and ended up reading it one year later after completing his Master’s thesis. He was so taken by this book that he completed it in just one day and was quite struck by this part of psychoanalytic history that he had not been aware of.
Freud tends to be thought of as a thinker who viewed the world from a colonialist lens. And there of course is truth to this. Freud tended to see the European culture as the universal norm, whereas cultures from other countries were seen as prim