The Idea of the Past: History, Science, and Practise in American Psychoanalysis: Leonard Jonathan Lamm Psychoanalytic Crosscurrents.  New York University Press, New York, 1993,  310 pp.

The Idea of the Past is one of an interesting series edited by Leo Goldberger of the Department of Psychology of New York University; its author once taught political theory and now practises clinical

psychology In this ambitious and unusually reflective book L. J. Lamm seeks to reconsider how psychoanalysis looks at the past, and he relies on contemporary continental theorists like H. G. Gadamer in taking a humanistic approach to how we construct narrative accounts of personal history.

Ever since its beginning psychoanalysis has been linked to certain unfortunate turn-of-the-century convictions about causality. Lamm takes an attractive position as he tries to ensure that psychoanalytic theory absorbs the lessons of current hermeneutical thinking. He is in favour of “pluralism”, a term which can mean a number of different things

Lamm does a conscientious job of evaluating the work of recent thinkers like Roy Schafer, as well as some other contemporary writers; but one wonders why, when the whole system of ideas he is working with had its origins elsewhere, he decided to restrict himself to American psychoanalysis. Even Gadamer, whom Lamm cites approvingly, comes out of a European context.

Throughout the conscientiousness that pervades The Idea of the Past I had the impression of an unnecessary degree of scholasticism: for example, someone like Schafer seemed to Freud's daughter Anna to have made unacceptable concessions in terms of orthodox theorizing, and Heinz Kohut, who comes up in The Idea of the Past, was deemed by Anna Freud to have ended up “antipsychoanalytic”. I do not share Anna Freud's convictions about either Schafer or Kohut, but I think it would have been better for Lamm to acknowledge some of the reasons that innovation has been so difficult until now. I do not think it makes much intellectual sense to pretend that there are (false) continuities when in fact serious disagreements among analytic theorists have been notable

In fact I wonder why Lamm did n