A review of Psychoanalysis at the Margins by Paul E. Stepansky New York:  Other Press, 2009,  357 pp.

Reading this fascinating book by the former managing director of The Analytic Press, I had the recurrent image of being under water, looking up. It was impossible, of course, to see beyond the mirrored surface, but the objects at the surface, outlined with brilliant light, were startlingly clear: half-submerged, swimming bodies, the hulls of boats, the bottoms of surfboards and rubber rafts, floating leaves, the piles of piers lapped by waves, resting sea birds. It was a strange disorienting perspective, yet undoubtedly real and thoroughly compelling.

Paul Stepansky has done an extraordinary job of reflecting our world back to us, but upside-down, as it were, inside-out. It's not the picture we usually see, cluttered with our conventional notions of what we expect to encounter. Moreover, it is a somewhat idiosyncratic view, colored by his unique experiences in the field, as a publisher, historian of psychiatry and medicine, and editor of a wide spectrum of psychoanalytic authors. But it is brilliant and true—and deeply felt. His book offers a unique opportunity to see ourselves as, I believe, we need to see ourselves today: a professional world fragmented, marginalized, incoherent, and fading.