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In his Book of Imaginary Beings Jorge Luis Borges mentions the Goofus Bird, known to the lumberjacks of Wisconsin and Minnesota as the bird that “flies backwards, because it doesn't care where it's going, but where it has been.” Much as this mythological bird, Douglas Frayn looks into the trail of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society to understand where it is now.
The Toronto Psychoanalytic Society has always been a sort of mystery for me, and I think I'm not alone in this, at least outside Toronto. This delightful book should help to unveil the mystery, even for many of the newer generations of Torontonians. Moreover, having been a member of the Argentine society, one with many more stories than Toronto, you can believe me when I say that other psychoanalytic societies share many of the challenges facing the TPS. It is in this sense that this book will have an appeal well beyond the Toronto society. The testimonies, some of which are very candid and in which the pain of recollection is obvious, paint a picture of a society becoming insightful about its shortcomings and the burden of its history.
Because there are so many different contributors to this book, there is naturally some redundancy, but the good side of it is that the stories, and Toronto has many, are coloured by the variations in the narrators' perspectives. It is said that the victors always write history, and this is somehow true in this book. The voices of those who left in disgrace or out of disinterest, or retreated from active roles, are obviously not heard. Their side of the story can only be presumed from the perceptions of those who wrote.
Most of the analysts who have written here regret the internal strife in their society, and see it as a pathology peculiar to the psychoanalytic profession. The usual suspects are the narcissism of the analysts, the difficult transfer of power from generation to generation, the overvaluation of the ideas of the group with which we