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This book is a useful addition to the growing library of critical studies and surveys of the post-modern condition. The choice of subject-matter is timely because of our increasingly contradictory relationship with disappointment in all its forms. The Introduction states that ‘(this book) explores the nature of identity in late modern society’. Furthermore, that by retrieving and examining the ‘“negative” strands of psychoanalysis’, i.e. its articulation of meaningful - because realistic - disappointments, ‘psychoanalytic therapy can become more than ideology, (thus) offering genuine help to its patients and providing a real source of radical social criticism’.
The author is well placed to advance this particular critique for he is both a sociologist and a psychoanalytic group psychotherapist. His thesis is that ‘there is much about our modern world that increases disappointment and at the same time encourages us to hide from it’ (my italics). Psychoanalysis and its off-shoots are implicated in this predicament. The text is a relatively easy read and is impressively referenced. It is possible though that psychoanalysts might be surprised to read about ‘psychoanalysis … promising results that are competitive rather than realistic’. To my knowledge, psychoanalysts tend to be cautious and ever-mindful of the reality principle.
Dr Craib's main argument is with these aspects (belief systems) of psychoanalysis which continue to influence our understanding of and approach to the human condition in late modern society. They are, broadly speaking, reductionistic on the one hand and naively emancipative on the other, with each stance susceptible to ideological misguidedness and/or misuse. He supports his argument by way of succinct (if somewhat selective) critical overviews of well-known Freudian and Kleinian concepts as well as close readings of Bowlby and Winnicott and those within the British independent school of psychoanalysis. I noted the following interesting comment of