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The Annual of Psychoanalysis, a periodical sponsored by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, has endured and prospered now for twenty-two years, an admirable record indeed. Publications supported by a single institute are rare enough in our field, and few have sustained themselves for so long while maintaining a record of such consistently high quality. The Annual's intelligent, scholarly, iconoclastic tone is of a piece with the creative, original, and contentious leadership of the Chicago Institute itself, Franz Alexander and Heinz Kohut serving as prime exhibits. It was therefore a pleasure to be assigned the task of reading the Annual straight through, and we found in this twenty-second volume a set of fifteen challenging, thought-provoking articles questioning basic tenets of psychoanalysis and offering knowledge from other disciplines.
Volume 22 is divided into four sections. The first contains addresses and discussions from the Institute's Sixtieth Anniversary Conference; the second concerns psychoanalysis and the visual arts; the third explores the German experience of third-party payers; and the fourth contains theoretical and clinical papers united by the challenge they pose to the usual way of thinking about and working with analytic patients.
The volume begins with an article by Jane Flax, provocatively titled “Final Analysis? Psychoanalysis in the Postmodern West,” the work of a political scientist who reviews the position of psychoanalysis in the contemporary world. Flax contends that analysis is experiencing difficulty in maintaining both its theoretical foundation and its place among the helping professions, especially medicine. “One of the contemporary paradoxes confronting American psychoanalysis,” she writes, “is the lack of reciprocity in its allegiance to the identification with the medical model.” What is more, she tells us, psychoanalysis “overlaps the terrain shared and contested by others, for example, philosophers,