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Freedom is a notoriously difficult concept or, rather, maze of concepts, and psychoanalysts have wisely tended to leave it alone. However Kennedy seeks to explore the place of freedom in psychoanalysis, contrasting psychoanalytic notions with philosophical ones.
He claims that the type of freedom which is of most concern in analysis is the freedom to relate since the freedom to act is curtailed. By freedom to relate he means the ability to be close to people without feeling stifled, the ability ‘to be free to want what one wants, and to be free to relate in the way that one wants’. He even speaks of intra-psychic freedom in which one is free to go in and out of the depressive position. He gives several clinical vignettes illustrating how psychoanalysis removes obstacles to freedom, mainly by working through the transference.
A lot of the book is taken up with brief expositions of a number of philosophers and philosophical movements. Thus we have a brief history of hermeneutics in one chapter. In another the author ranges over most of Western philosophy from Plato to Habermas concentrating on notions of reason and freedom. This chapter is extraordinarily arbitrary in its choices and insultingly brief in its exposition of