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Lewis Aron and Karen Starr's A Psychotherapy for the People: Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis is a big book in more than one sense. In 440 densely printed pages, Aron and Starr both present the position of relational psychoanalysis as it has emerged in the last decades and a program for its future. They have two explicit goals: one is to liberate psychoanalysis from a number of binary oppositions, like psychoanalysis vs. psychotherapy, male vs. female, autonomy vs. dependence. The other is to plea for a psychoanalysis that is progressive in a number of ways: no longer confined to those who can afford doing analysis four times a week; no longer bound by rigid conceptions of normative femininity and masculinity; and no longer defined by rigidity of ritual, but by a much more fluid ethos.
In many ways this has been the project of relational psychoanalysis since its inception almost three decades ago. Its major proponents, including Aron for more than two decades, from the outset were intent on dismantling dichotomies, rigidities, and certain elements of authoritarianism in psychoanalytic treatment and institution. A Psychotherapy for the People is squarely within this tradition, but goes a step further, as its title indicates. After a century in which more psychoanalysts were busy arguing why psychoanalysis is essentially different from psychotherapies, the title is a rallying cry for a psychoanalysis that is part of the family of therapies.
The closest Aron and Starr come to a delineation of psychoanalysis-they don't attempt a definition in the strict sense-is by quoting Shedler's influential paper “The Effectiveness of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy” in American Psychologist, which argued that statistical meta-analysis of psychotherapy studies show conclusively that psychodynamic treatment had a clear beneficial psychotherapeutic effect (pp. 374-375). It is telling and important that to characterize psychoanalysis Aron and Starr choose a paper that did not differentiat