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Altman's Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change (2015) is a continuation of his twenty-five years of thinking about the application of psychoanalytic principles on several planes. He addresses these principles as he understands them with respect to social and cultural phenomena outside and apart from the treatment process as well as their clinical application within it; he also considers the significance of cultural influences on the personalities of the patients we strive to understand and to devise treatment responses for. The thesis of his book supports psychoanalysis as a method of inquiry and way of understanding. Altman advocates moving psychoanalytic principles out of the consulting room and into our communities, schools, and corporations. He applies his psychoanalytic lens to the world we all observe. By challenging our ideas Altman means to show that psychoanalytic theory is not only applicable, but indispensable both to working with and on our patients and understanding our wider world of cultural change.
Applying psychoanalytic ideas outside of the treatment room inevitably leads to the difficult task of defining psychoanalysis. As his definition in this book, Altman uses Freud's study of transference and resistance (1914/1962), and the science of unconscious mental processes (1923/1962). Altman rejects the tendency to define psychoanalysis by such criteria as frequency