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This is a major interdisciplinary work on the history of psychoanalysis, an invaluable work, and important for psychoanalytic clinicians. It offers such depth, scope, and detail that it is not likely to have any serious rival for decades. A big book that took the author years to conceptualize, research, and write, it deserves serious study and cri-tique. It draws upon, and itself documents, a history of major writers on the relationship between psychoanalysis and society, going back to the second decade of the twentieth century. Examples are the psycho-analysts Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Erik Erikson, Joel Kovel, and Victor Wolfenstein and the cultural historians and critics Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Carl Schorske, and Slavoj ž iž ek.
My review touches on the experience of reading this work, which has stirred up conflicted feelings within me about psychoanalysis— especially as a movement—and, I believe, usefully so. My reactions may well mirror the author's struggles and ambivalence, as suggested by his statement that “as a historian and political person, I not only learned from psychoanalysis but wrestled with and against it. This book sums up a protracted, conflictridden, but immensely productive encounter …” (p. iii).
I write this review from several vantage points, not only as a psychoanalytic clinician, but also as someone who has worked in the borderlands between psychoanalysis and the social sciences and psychoanalysis and the humanities—in teaching, study groups, and collaborative writing. I have also been one of a number of analysts who have struggled with questions of the relationship between the analyst as clinician and as political creature, and how the political issues and