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Is it ethical to offer education in psychoanalysis? The inescapable implication to be drawn from a reading of Kate Schechter's Illusions of a Future is that it is not, at least in Chicago. She reports that psychoanalytic practice there has been dead since the 1970s, maintained for a while in a zombie-like state through the smoke-and-mirrors administrative and financial machinations of George Pollock. The recent Chicago Institute graduates she interviews have few or no patients in analysis, though each clings to an image of analysis—in each case a different image. Such allegiance to an absent entity she characterizes as “fetishization,” and the analysts she presents do come across as pathetic in their devotion to, and invocation of, an illusion.
Schechter's message is somewhat obscured by her ambitions, when setting out on this book, to provide a braided account of “several modes of analysis at once: a textual analysis of the place of crisis in professional discourse; a structural account of psychoanalysis's difficult history of institutional reproduction in the United States; an ethnographic and historical reading of a group of psychoanalysts’ attempts to define their practices in positive terms; and a political-philosophical analysis of the ‘resistances’ of psychoanalysis that make it so seemingly impossible for psychoanalysts to organize collectively to resist health-care industrialization” (pp. 5-6). If this seems an impossible burden for one volume, it is. Strands of thought begin, but then are never conclusively brought into contact with the subject matter, or else confusingly shift their meanings without warning.
Schechter, trained in anthropology and social work, tells us the “ethnographic research consisted of participant observation in the Chicago psychoanalytic community over three years,” including a period during