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At a time when psychoanalysis is in the descendant and psychoanalytic publishing reducing its activities, Radical Psychoanalysis promises to be an important and valuable book in which Barratt argues passionately for a return to the discipline's roots (this is a key part of the ‘Radical’ title) in the free associative praxis; it is in the author's own words a plea ‘for a return to Freud's originality, in the interests of a wisdom that has been, over the course of the last century, obfuscated and all but lost’ (p. 2). The purpose of the book is to investigate the method of free association as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Barratt contends that despite the work of those such as Laplanche and André Green, to whom he pays homage, Freud's praxis of free association and the extent of his ‘Copernican’ revolution, have, in the main, been marginalized. The book expands on and elucidates his views as to why and how this is.
It is a pity that this outspoken and timely book is undermined by the author's unarguable erudition. I am not the only one to find his complexity difficult (Reppen, 2018). Without a careful reading of his earlier work, notably his book What is Psychoanalysis? (2012) and, at least, some of his papers (for example, Barratt, 2014), the text in this book, at times, verges on the inaccessible. Stylistically, Barratt's penchant for neologism, coinage and idiosyncratic locution drives the reader to take recourse in the dictionary.
I would put in a plea for greater simplicity of presentation, for some stringent editing, and copy-editing of the text. Sign of the times it may be to have minimal editing, but an edit to reduce repetition and obscurity would surely have been in order. This said, the book offers a compelling, if over-stated argument that psychoanalysis viewed as ‘a free associative praxis’ is much more radical, indeed ‘Copernican’, than has previously been considered. In putting forward his ‘manifesto’, Barratt privileges Freud's writings from 1896 to