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It is bracing to be reminded of the interdisciplinary roots of Interpersonal psychoanalysis. Frie and Sauvayre, the editors of this ground breaking volume, forthrightly state at the outset (p. 7), “…we believe strongly in the need for psychoanalysts to engage in cross-disciplinary thinking and practice and thus to create opportunities for the kind of radical learning that was once available but lost as a result of institutional and disciplinary boundary setting.” I find it inspiring, troubling, and puzzling to read how much cross disciplinary scholarship filled the first volume of the journal Psychiatry. Each chapter in Frie and Sauvayre’s edited volume examines a paper from the 1938 edition of Psychiatry, notes its central issues, and surveys relevant literature from more recent sources. As Frie and Sauvayre make clear, the need for an interdisciplinary approach has not changed, but forces against it limit its appearance in contemporary publications.
What are these forces? What happened to the inclusive spirit of the Interpersonal psychoanalytic pioneers? Those of us accustomed to life in academic settings will not be surprised but may well be disheartened. I know I am. I am in agreement with Katharina Rothe (whose chapter is titled “Reproduction and resistance: Psychoanalysis in the midst of the political economy”) when she says that in erecting
boundaries between fields of study (p. 157) “…what is being protected is not the integrity of a discipline, or an institution, but they rather serve to exclude the competition (such as the competition of non-medical doctors in relation to medical doctors).”
In 1938, that first volume of Psychiatry included contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, educators, lawyers, philosophers, historians, and, of course, mental health professionals. In the breadth of its representation of professional backgrounds it would be hard to name its equal. Only one interdisciplin