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In this quite polemical short book, Kohon makes a passionate plea for the unique qualities of psychoanalysis, and against the requirement for accountability that he feels is imposed by the mental health establishment. Though he reveres, and often quotes, Freud's genius in unravelling the workings of the unconscious, he sees his ‘misplaced ideals of scientism’ (p. 1) as partly responsible for capitulating to demands for proof of its effectiveness; and mounts a passionate defence of the single case study as the only way to demonstrate, rather than quantify, the specific workings of the psychoanalytic method.
To this end, he presents two extended pieces of work with two very different patients, whom he calls Tony and Barbara, to illustrate the complexity and unquantifiable nature of psychoanalysis. ‘If there are new psychoanalytic breakthroughs, whether theoretical or therapeutic, they emerge from the work carried out by the individual psychoanalyst in the consulting room with the patient’ (p. 7). Kohon underpins this approach with reference to quantum physics, quoting Carlo Rovelli's principle of indeterminacy, ‘a concept describing something that cannot be clearly defined or completely known’ (p. 3). He also enlists Thomas Kuhn's apparent shift from the famous idea of paradigms to that of ‘exemplars’, as the foundation of psychoanalytic training via the study of individual cases.
It would be difficult to do justice to the range and depth of Kohon's erudition in fields other than the psychoanalytic: he refers to philosophy, to modern physics, and to literature among other disciplines. But the core of his work is in assembling a range of references to the great tradition of psychoanalytic theorists, some of whom he sets against each other to enhance his central argument. Kohon's training in Argentina was largely Kleinian, and although Kleinian and post-Kleinian thinking permeates this work, he is open to some Laingian and Lacanian ideas, including untranslated French ter