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Ken Eisold's significant, thoughtful and stimulating collection of closely related essays from the past 20 years is the product of continuing reflections about the ongoing crisis of psychoanalysis. Eisold is passionate about the profession and committed to it, as well as being disappointed with it and concerned about its future.
He is a practising psychoanalyst and eminent organizational consultant based in New York, with a long record of writing on the psychodyanamics of large systems and psychoanalytic history. He is a Past President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, a former Director of the Organizational Program and currently President of the William Alanson White Institute in New York.
The book addresses often hidden issues that affect the field inside the box it has constructed for itself. Eisold proposes that if we want to think outside the box, we have to be able to see it first. To do this, he sees it as imperative to move beyond both the psychoanalytic dyad of patient and analyst and the tripartite training structure. Psychoanalysis needs to encompass the organizational understanding that comes from the study of institutional structures and the social and historical forces that mould them.
The book is divided into three sections: ‘Psychoanalytic History’; ‘Organizational Analysis’; and ‘Problems of Professionalization’.
The first part of this book on psychoanalytic history will be especially interesting to readers of this journal. There Eisold thoughtfully and innovatively examines psychoanalytic history, focusing on its early history in Vienna, the splitting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
The rich first chapter, ‘Freud as Leader: The Early Years of the Viennese Society’, sets the scene for understanding the beginnings of the problems very well. Freud lamented his own lack of leadership skills in not being able to establish ‘friendly