You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr Young sets out to do two things. Firstly, to locate psychoanalysis within ‘the history of thought about nature and human nature, with particular reference to Cartesian mind-body dualism’, and secondly, to address the question of ‘what enhances and constricts mental space’ in the light of different psychoanalytic approaches. These he categorizes according to whether they are ‘useful and resonant with our experience, as contrasted with scientific versions of psychology’.
The attempt to place psychoanalysis in an historical, social and cultural context is timely and one insufficiently considered by a rather solipsistic profession concerned with the inner world. Dr Young displays formidable erudition and encyclopaedic knowledge and bombards the reader with fascinating quotations. Indeed, the bibliography runs to 18 pages, including 46 references to the author's own papers, 20 to those of Freud, and 12 to Klein.
The book raises important issues about reification and concretization, problems which inevitably arise when any effort is made to define ‘mental space’. It explores interpretations and misinterpretations of reality within and without the analytic frame, particularly with reference to racism, one of the most destructive attributes of human beings. Indeed, the detailed exposition of the intertwining social and psychological components of racism seems to stand on its own as a study.
Dr Young provides a useful discussion of various psychoanalytic concepts, particularly of ones stemming from the object relations school, including projective identification and transitional space. He describes the former as ‘the most fruitful psychoanalytic concept since the discovery of the unconscious’ and as the one that ‘offers the key to understanding how the primitive integrates with the social’. He emphasizes the reductive, scientistic nature of the Freudian metaphors of forces and drives, preferring the Kleinian system on the grounds that it lays less claim to scientific certitu