The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class and Culture through A Psychoanalytic Lens by Neil Altman. Second edition. Published by  Analytic Press, New York, NY, 2009;  370 pp; £24.95 paperback, £65.00 hardback.

Neil Altman is a key figure in Relational Psychoanalysis, a psychoanalytic grouping inspired by Stephen Mitchell and now a dominant variant of psychoanalysis on the East Coast of America and internationally. Altman was editor of the relational journal, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and has published widely. This book is in the Relational Book series published by the Analytic Press/Taylor & Francis, and, while the first edition was only the third in the series, this heavily revised second edition is volume 40, testament to how original and prolific that group has been. Relational psychoanalysis has managed to form a creative, fluid and critical body of theory from a range of diverse influences, such as the interpersonal traditions of Harry Stack Sullivan, self-psychology, intersubjective approaches, developmental and attachment perspectives, critical theory as well as British object-relations theory. Altman has been particularly influenced by British thinkers such as Bion, Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott, and such thinking infuses the text.

The text weaves together relational ideas with clinical examples in a project that is social and political as much as clinical. Altman challenges readers to move outside the traditional private practice domain of psychoanalysis and urges us to apply a political perspective to psychoanalytic discourse in order that conservative currents can be challenged. A former president of the Section