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I was talking with a friend recently about a mutual acquaintance, also in the field. “He's progressive but not crazy,” my friend said in sharing my appreciation of our colleague. In his comment, he reflected something I think many of us struggle with: how do we help the field of psychoanalysis to progress (or be progressive) without throwing out valuable pieces of our past and valuable lessons taught by those who came before us? This need for change, to bring our theories and practice into the contemporary scene in a useful way, is something that has engaged my thinking and my teaching for quite a while, so I was pleased to be asked to review Axelrod, Naso, and Rosenberg's Progress in Psychoanalysis: Envisioning the Future of the Profession.
The tension around balancing the old and the new runs throughout this volume. In his call in chapter 1 for a “strong pluralism,” Elliot Jurist takes on the problem that, by retaining too much of the past alongside new ideas, one can, as David Lichtenstein notes, “lapse into an incoherent pluralism” (p. 80). This collection of papers demonstrates that there are many areas in which psychoanalysts are actively engaged in doing things differently, including the critiques of past ways of engaging with contemporary problems. I do think they also miss some signs of progress within psychoanalytic organizations, which I will reference.
That psychoanalysis is a complex, multiply tasked field complicates the marking of progress. Are we talking about theory? Practice? Training? Applications? Relationships with other intellectual and healthcare fields? Its place in contemporary intellectual life? Its willingness to be receptive to differences within the field and among disparate fields? The bridging