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This well-timed collection of essays addresses very actual and pressing preoccupations in the psychoanalytical world. At the time of my reading it, a congress whose title - ‘Call for a States General of Psychoanalysis’ - suggests the urgency of the situation, was taking place in Paris (July 2000) and was heralded by six long articles in Le Monde (6 to 11 July 2000). Meanwhile, in London, a group of psychoanalysts met to discuss links between Freudian theory and neuroscience.
From a variety of backgrounds, Johannes Cremerius and his seven co-writers attempt an exacting analysis of the reasons behind the apparent decline of psychoanalysis and its lack of relevance to the modern world, but also offer possible solutions and a brave invitation to think afresh and to change.
Cremerius, whose essay gave the book its title, notes that all attempts to recognize the crisis and identify its causes have looked for answers outside institutional psychoanalysis. He refers specifically to an edition of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and enumerates its findings:
increase in alternative forms of therapy
switch in psychiatry to an approach rooted in biology and behavioural therapy
greater trust in pharmacological forms of therapy
disappointment with the curative effect of psychoanalysis exacerbated by the criticisms of a malevolent press.
Bravely, Cremerius reverses the diagnosis and sees the facts enumerated above not as the causes but as the results of problems and failures within the profession. From the beginning, he underlines the dichotomy between the principles of psychoanalysis, namely liberation through enlightenment, and the spirit of the psychoanalytic movements reflected in the hierarchical and authoritarian structure of the International Psychoanalytic Association from the time of its foundation in Nuremberg; in 1910.