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Although this book does not quite live up to what my expectations were for it, it is still an illuminating and provocative read. In it, seventeen authors examine fifteen psychoanalytic schools of thought. After a brief introduction by the editors and an overview by Edith Kurzweil, each chapter begins with the recounting of the essential elements and basic theoretical concepts of a particular school, then attempts to describe what is its implicit and/or explicit view of the human condition. The basis for my disappointment is that in most chapters the former task is more successfully accomplished than the latter, and it is the promise of the latter that had given rise to my expectations. Each chapter, by the way, begins with a brief synopsis written by the editors. I realize it is the current style in psychoanalytic journals for authors to prepare a synopsis of their articles to alert the reader as to what the article contains; I am not sure why in this volume the editors chose to do it themselves; these brief synopses are informative but they feel at the same time intrusive into the relationship between the author and the reader.
The schools of thought are a mix of those closely associated with one individual and those that are more general. The individual theorists discussed are Jung, Adler, Horney, Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Bion, Kohut, Schafer, Lacan, and (of course!) Freud. The more general schools include existential psychoanalysis (largely about Laing), interpersonal psychoanalysis, the hermeneutic approach, and feminism. As the authors say in their overview, clinical “facts” are always established within a particular given theory, and that “psychotherapists need to be more aware … that what they are providing their patients is a conception of life, a particular story about the nature of the world and what it means to be human in that world. What