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Alongside the convivial - if inward-turned - psychoanalytic worlds of Hampstead and Manhattan, a number of less clubbable pioneers stand out. Ronald Fairbairn (Edinburgh), Takeo Doi (Tokyo), Heinrich Racker (Buenos Aires), and Russell Mears (Sydney) have made major contributions from, and perhaps in part because of, comparative isolation. An outstanding contemporary example is Barnaby Barratt, originally from the UK, who trained and worked in the USA, and is now a training analyst in Johannesburg, South Africa. Under review here is the concluding volume of his ‘trilogy’, one of the most original, stimulating and scholarly psychoanalytic contributions of the past decade.
Beyond Psychotherapy, an extended and extensively annotated essay, focuses on two principal interconnected themes. The first theorizes the difference between psychoanalysis proper and other forms of psychotherapy, including the psychodynamic therapies. Second is Barratt's attempt to capture the aim and purpose of psychoanalysis, not in conventional terms of outcome measures, changes in rating scales, remission of symptoms etc., but as an existential transmutation of the self.
Barratt's starting point is the primacy of free association, both as Freud's (1914) theoretical ‘cornerstone’, and as the defining methodology of psychoanalysis. The analyst's free associative ears listen to the ‘enigmatic messages’ of the unconscious, its ‘embodied experience’ and its ‘otherness’. Free association deconstructs the notion of a unitary ‘I’, with its implication of dominance and self-mastery, opening the subject to the multiplicity of selves and their voices.