You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Barnaby B. Barratt has written several significant books and articles suggesting that the value of lived experience, as opposed to cognition, has long been under-valued in the psychoanalytic endeavour. His latest book on the subject, and the focus of this review, is the third volume in a trilogy that engages the psychoanalytic reader on several levels.
In the first volume of the trilogy (Barratt 2013) the author describes in some detail how psychoanalysis has enriched our understanding of the human condition. He commends Freud’s early investigations utilizing free association as crucial in the development of the field. But he feels that the drift toward orthodoxy which he cites as beginning with the formation of the Secret Committee, in 1912, diverted from the explorations via free association of the repressed unconscious as rooted in the body and in pre-cognitive experience. Barratt feels this trend has continued amidst the several current schools of psychoanalytic thought, to the scientific detriment of the field.
In his second volume (Barratt 2016) he continues the theme that the authentic freedom from the impingements of cognition can only occur via adherence to the practice of free association, which he labels as Radical Psychoanalysis. He cautions, as previously, against reliance on cognitively-based formulations and restrictive technique.
And the third volume (Barratt 2019), the focus of this review, continues this emphasis on privileging, via Radical Psychoanalysis, the unrepresentable level of experience.
Offering a definition, Barratt says:
Radical psychoanalysis prioritizes a unique process of listening-and-opening inwards – the rigorous method of free-associative praxis – rather than the arrival at supposedly improved behavior, beliefs or feelings about one’s place in the world. (2)
Barratt states that free-associative listening opens us up to the interiority of our “being in the world”. He says that it creatively decenters us, and that it is not based on