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The further that psychoanalytic thought moves away from the analytic situation the more tenuous become its possible insights. From Freud onwards, the history of psychoanalysis is littered with social and political speculation that is either banal or spurious. It is to the merit of most of the contributors to this book - as it is to the Free Associations project as a whole - that they manage to look at a wide range of political matters with the benefits of psychoanalysis without falling into these traps.
To call something a crisis these days is, as editor Barry Richards remarks in his introduction, a very ordinary description, usually heralding some cliched analysis. And yet, as Richards maintains rightly, crises there are, even if their nature is longterm, perhaps even perpetual. And with all such crises - be they of political beliefs, gender or racial identity or existence itself - the external social world is not an inert backcloth but an active constituent.
I am not convinced that everything in this book relates to a ‘crisis’ in any meaningful sense and a more accurate title might have been found, but that is a minor point. It is certainly undeniable that all the papers respond in some way to problems of contemporary experience, usually by means of Kleinian or object relations theory. These include the collapse of political certainties (Paul Hoggett), culture (Robert Young, touching and amusing, on transitional phenomena; Jed Sekoff on the ‘minddoctor film’ - but why no mention of one of the best and most serious attempts in this genre, Ken McMullen's Zina?), gender and sexual identity (Amal Treacher on advice in women's magazines; Marie Maguire on gendered disorders), racial identity (Stephen Frosh, Philip Cohen and Valerie Sinason) and survival itself (Jane Temperley on the nuclear threat).
Implicit in much of the book is a welcome argument against the excesses of postmodernism, in particular the celebration of fragmentation. Psychoanalysis, as Barry Richards show