Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium edited by Nancy Ginsberg and Roy Ginsberg. Published by  Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1999;  394 pages; £28.00 hardback.

This is a book about the relationship between psychoanalysis and twentieth-century thought. Psychoanalysis is seen here as part of the modernist revolt against positivism at the end of the nineteenth century with Freud still embattled 100 years later as an overarching cultural icon at odds with the particularism and relativism of postmodernity. What is the cultural situation of psychoanalysis at the end of the twentieth century? How should psychoanalysis change to meet the postmodernist challenge?

These are the interesting questions posed by this eclectic set of essays and commentaries. Unfortunately no clear distinction is made between postmodernism and postmodernity and there is a curious lacuna in the area of the seminal thinkers in this territory; no mention of Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Rorty et al. Foucault, for example, believed that psychoanalysis straddled the main problematic of modern culture - the issue of what is meant by human subjectivity - and Freud was repeatedly given the role of the ‘other’ in Foucault's cultural critique.

Nevertheless, the book is often thought-provoking and stimulating in its juxtaposition of different perspectives. In his chapter on Freud and culture, Carl Schorske gives an acute analysis of the gendered cultural geography of Freud's mind, where, for example, England stood for masculinity, heterosexuality and discipline, while France represented femininity, bisexuality and aesthetic expressiveness. Thus