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The famous and now elderly Dr. Leo Rangell, in an attempt to reverse the chaotic pluralism in our discipline, is determined to present one unified theory of psychoanalysis. Both of us are in agreement that the widely eclectic pluralism that pervades the field now is a harbinger of the destruction and marginalization of the whole discipline. The situation is even worse than that, for rather than having an unfortunate mélange of pluralistic viewpoints we have, “a growing plurality of orthodoxies that are responsive to authority rather than data … each group sheltered under its own guru, tending to be self-enclosed, self-satisfied, and fighting off all the others” (Cooper, 2008, p. 250).
In one way or another, the whole of the recent fashions of eclecticism, pluralism, and postmodern thought are opposed by the author. He writes from an autobiographical viewpoint so that this book is in a sense a postscript to his (Rangell, 2004) previous autobiography and is also summarized by him (Rangell, 2008) in a recent article. Rangell writes in an easy reading almost journalistic style, as he recounts his experiences with the American Psychoanalytic Association dating from the 1940s. He maintains that by the admission of psychologists, the American Psychoanalytic Association has now reversed its position as contrasted to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. The latter, he says, because it admits only physicians, is now the more conservative of the two groups, which is the opposite of the way in which it was founded. He does admit that the problem of lay analysis is a vexing one for all of us and is as yet unresolved.
The present book is essentially a polemic. The earlier chapters deal with the development of psychoanalysis and recount some of the current problems. The final chapters offer Rangell's proposed solution. Chapter 4 covers the original controversies in the development of the field and what he calls the “pre-splitting.” Chapter 5 reviews the more recent splits or seco