Cultural Collapse

Dear Editor

Your readers may be interested to know about the publication this spring of Cultural Collapse by Free Association Books. The book arose out of my background in education and my experience, training and practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, but also very much from discussion, debate and argument with colleagues and friends over many years.

It provides a searching study of the growing impoverishment of life in Western society - a subject that has been neglected on the whole by psychoanalysis in recent times. On the one hand, it sets out basic psychoanalytic principles, differentiating psychoanalytic psychotherapy from other forms of psychotherapy; and, on the other hand, it uses these principles to explore in a radical way contemporary issues of violence, addiction, the crisis in the family and education, the loss of our capacity to contain and savour experience, feminism and the shattering of male narcissism, and the unravelling of the social fabric.

The central paradox explored is that while we undoubtedly enjoy greater freedom and abundance than ever before, at least in the rich affluent parts of the world, we nevertheless notice a corresponding inner weakness, rage and loss of cohesion. This psychial depletion parallels and is connected with the depletion of our external resources.

The book reminds us that psychoanalysis is not only arguably our sole coherent theory and treatment of mental illness, but also it is a theory of human nature and the human condition, and is therefore well placed to comment on the problems of modernity. It explains how psychoanalytic ideas have been consistently misunderstood and and overthrown in favour of narcissistic options, which deny essential human vulnerability, relatedness and solidarity as well as the apprehension of universal values.

The explosive force of modern consumer capitalism is seen as excessively stimulating desire, fatally narrowing the gap between impulse and gratification, sponsoring splitting, regressi