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Questions of importance for psychoanalysts have been debated in this able book by Eissler. The subject may seem to British readers not to concern them; a great deal of hard-hitting criticism is directed against American institutes of psychoanalysis, American failings (in the author's view), and American psychoanalytic ‘heresies’. Ostensibly he is arguing in favour of the lay analyst – which again may appear to a British psychoanalyst to be a subject no longer for debate, but which to me appears only to be one facet of the problem of the relationship between group and mystic which has now become vital for the psychoanalytic group. On an adequate solution of this the future of psychoanalysis hangs, and the adequate solution demands, as a prerequisite, adequate debate. This is not possible unless psychoanalysts are prepared to spend time studying the history and dynamics of the relationship between the mystic and the group. Eissler's book should be read against the background of this seldom and inadequately discussed phenomenon. The central point is the impact of an explosive force on a pre-existing framework. This configuration is recurrent, and can be detected in the impact of new ideas on an old vocabulary, formula, or deductive system; or of the genius, mystic, or messiah upon the group in which his presence becomes manifest.
The group and mystic are essential to each other: it is therefore important to consider how or why the group can destroy the mystic on whom its future depends and how or why the mystic may destroy the group. The reader will not expect me to do more than indicate the nature of the questions at issue. I do not wish to pronounce upon it, but to say why it is vital that the problem should be seen to exist and to be inherent – both in the nature of man as a political animal, and in the nature of psychoanalysis as the explosive force.