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Where has psychoanalysis gone wrong? What has happened that so eroded public confidence in a field? These are major concerns throughout Leo Rangell's noteworthy book that spans the six decades thus far of a remarkably rich psychoanalytic life. He has been right at the centre of many controversies that have spanned the last psychoanalytic century. Born in 1913 in New York, he published this summation, reflection and memoir in early 2004, only a few months after his ninetieth birthday. With a number of books and some 450 articles, Rangell has made significant contributions across a wide range of issues from clinical child psychoanalysis through ego psychology to the psychoanalysis of public opinion. He was in the eye of the storm politically, locally in Los Angeles, nationally in the US and internationally in the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), having been three times president of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, twice President of the American Psychoanalytic Association and twice president of the IPA.
This book situates Rangell's theoretical work within its psychoanalytic socio-political context. It reflects a dialectic that encapsulates the way people and ideas influence and condition each other. It sums up his general approach to psychoanalysis as an overarching systematic method that is based upon theory. This theory is not dogma but is open to criticism and development in a scientific way. Too often psychoanalytic institutions have inhibited creativity instead of promoting it. The book interweaves events, people and ideas in a fascinating development spanning the 60 years from the 1940s when Rangell trained as a psychoanalyst.
Rangell proposes as his abiding linchpin the goal of a ‘unitary psychoanalysis’ to be distinguished from the pluralistic approach so widespread