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This is a political book. It is a compilation of essays that are against capitalism and for the psychology of infancy. They explore social phenomena from a Marxist perspective using a psychoanalytic framework. Some contributors to the book are connected with a recent venture to establish a new psychotherapy journal (known as Free Associations) concerned with the cultural, philosophical and political relevance of the psychotherapies.
The eager use that Marxists have been making recently of psychoanalytic concepts is of some interest to psychotherapists. This book documents the thinking of a young group of Anglo-American radicals whose political leanings derive from the frothy enthusiams of 1968. In May that year Parisian students started a revolution. Curiously it had a strong psychoanalytic flavour, inspired by Herbert Marcuse and Jaques Lacan.
Only after that event did it become apparent to the ordinary Anglo-Saxon world that you didn't have to be a Stalinist to be a Marxist, you didn't even have to like Russia. There seemed to have grown up a brand of Marxism that was specifically West European. For many of us insular English that was almost as bad as being Russian. However the Western forn of Marxism was strongly humanist, and contrasted with the economic determinism of orthodox Soviet communism. And being humanist it took account of human experience, and had for a long time been attempting to digest psychoanalytic views and integrate them -into a radical interpretation of the nature and process of society. It was particularly the ‘Frankfurt