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Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
The invitation to review a single volume of Barnaby B. Barratt’s trilogy, collectively an homage to free association, turned into an occasion for serendipitous revelation. I wound up discovering a leading contemporary psychoanalytic theorist who has been hiding in plain sight. While I’d chosen to review the middle volume only, Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free-Associative Praxis (2016), it drew me irresistibly to the other two—Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst (2019), and What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after Freud’s “Secret Committee” (2013). I’d intended to merely skim them for a sense of the larger project, time after all being what it is, jumping from chapter to distant chapter as guided by the disruptive flow of my curiosity and desire. But as I review my exuberant highlighting in all three texts, I see that my idiosyncratically associative and temporally circuitous path culminated in my my having read the entire trilogy.
I like to imagine that Barratt would approve of this haphazard method, insofar as he views psychoanalysis as “a journey of decomposition that frees the ‘elements,’ as it were, to rearrange themselves“ (p. 57). But also because what Barratt achieves in this remarkable, actually stunning, collection is to create a “temporal collage,” as Bollas (2002, p. 56) once described free association itself. Wherever we land in the trilogy, we find ideas and opinions the author has already reflected or will reflect upon, lending a reverberating motional energy to the entire project, creating cumulative layered and mind (theory)-altering effects. This is a remarkable achievement partly because the vastness of the author’s erudition and the indefatigable complexity of his thinking could easily, in the hands of a writer less skilled or a theorist less “compassionate and passionate” (his words for the analyst), barrage and stymie the reader. Instead, the author’s obvious love affair with what is “(radical) ps