Resistance, Complicity and Optimism: Some Practical Politics of Psychoanalysis: Freud and Fundamentalism: The Psychical Politics of Knowledge by S. Gourgouris (New York, NY:  Fordham University Press, 2010;  253 pp); First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking, and Resistance edited by A. Harris and S. Botticelli (New York, NY:  Routledge, 2010;  xxxii + 393 pp) Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas by N. Hollander (New York, NY:  Routledge, 2010;  432 pp)

Perhaps it is now fully evident that psychoanalysis is a practice of ethics. This means that it addresses questions of what it means to live a ‘good life’ and that it constantly frames even its therapeutic activities in these non-normalizing terms. Or perhaps it means that it should behave like that - as is well documented, the corrosive effects of conformism, timidity, ambition and envy have all played themselves out on the stage of psychoanalysis as much as anywhere else. So at various times psychoanalysis has espoused a kind of progressive rhetoric; but this has not stopped it becoming institutionally entangled with corrupt regimes as well as purveying an understanding of mental health that is at best conservative, and at worst - as in the sorry history of its treatment of homosexuality - oppressive. Yet, it is quite clear that psychoanalysis has attracted to it not only people who want to build their professional careers (psychoanalytic training not