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My first encounters with Philip Cushman’s thinking came in the 1990s when I read his incredible papers critiquing the ideological underpinnings of contemporary psychoanalytic theories of “the self” and of “the infant.” One of those papers, “Why the Self is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology,” is the lead chapter of this new collection of Cushman’s writings and talks, most of which were written between 2000 and 2017. For the most part, the papers collected here take aim not at psychoanalysis but at the broader profession of psychology, a profession that has lost its way. When the paper on the empty self appeared in 1990, I had just become a psychologist and had written my dissertation critiquing Kohut’s separation of what he had described as two separate lines of development. Having come from a critical theory background, I had found it difficult, both during and after my training, to identify as a psychologist. Reading Cushman’s new book made crystal clear to me the reasons for my persistent struggle with that identity: as he documents, although the psychology profession has always had a scientistic bent, it has, since the managed care revolution of the 1990s, increasingly and unapologetically become a scientistic, universalizing, fundamentalist enterprise that, to use Cushman’s hermeneutic discourse, brackets ethics only to promote a moral discourse (in disguise) that fully supports a neoliberal status quo and the version of self that the neoliberal order promotes.
Because I came to clinical psychology later in life, I somehow missed the emergence of critical psychology within the discipline of psychology. This new collection of papers establishes (once again) that Cushman is a preeminent voice within that critical psychology
movement. His claim that psychology and psychotherapy must be practiced as moral enterprises is a crucial counter to an era in which practitioners are being trained in one size fits all procedures for treating bundles of sympto