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This book represents an important and positive challenge to mainstream clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It sits within a long tradition of work, reaching back to Freud himself, concerned with the social engagement of psychoanalysis and the contribution of psychoanalysis to social engagement. Many of the authors are experienced psychoanalytic clinicians, all of them know their theory intimately, and each has a distinctive history or sphere of engagement that informs their thinking on a spectrum encompassing clinical work, research, organizational consultancy, front line welfare and teaching. The collection's epicentre is the innovative programme of work led by Paul Hoggett at the University of the West of England, which is part of a growing network of centres for psychoanalytically informed ‘psychosocial studies’ in the UK. One point of origin for this work lies in the Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conferences of the 1990s, hosted at the University of East London, where psychosocial studies also still flourish. These were marvellously creative events that helped revitalize a socially radical spirit in British psychoanalysis.
What is the intellectual project at the heart of this book? In her chapter on ‘Artistic Output as Intersubjective Third’, Lynn Froggett explores some practices associated with ‘restorative justice’ and refers to one of its aims as seeking “to restore a sense of connection between victim and offender in which both parties acknowledge themselves to belong to the same moral community” (p. 89). A sustained critique of psychoanalytic practice and theory that overtly or covertly render patient and analyst as members of different ‘moral communities’ is one organizing theme of the collection. In various ways the ‘relational turn’ in psychoanalysis is posited as a solution to the tendency of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis to assume ‘master narrative’ status for their theories, practices and clinical discourses. Of course,