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Comprised of 20 short chapters, Ian Parker's 2019 book, Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography, is written in an informal and informative tone, appropriately pitched for reports from the field. As the titular terms suggest, the reader is offered an account of subject formation: the formation of the author's professional identity, alongside his assessments of the identity of a profession with its numerous and infamously split-able institutions, and its renowned organizational ruptures and rivalries. Successfully charting the ways in which the personal and the political intersect across individual, institutional and broader cultural lines, many chapters, especially the later ones, stand alone as interesting, first-hand accounts of the different ‘Contexts’ under consideration. The reader is taken to Slovenia where Parker's fated relationship with Zizek is recounted to good effect, to Brazil and Japan to upend some of psychoanalysis's so-called universalisms, and to Russia where the case is made for the psychoanalytic clinic as a queer space. Curiously, given that so much ground is covered, there is also something small-scale about this project which is no doubt related to the genre of autobiography wherein the personal story is told, not for its own sake, but as a way to interrogate the kind of political, institutional and historical questions with which Parker is concerned.
We start at the beginning: a childhood home, a formative memory of being caught in a lie, maternal admonishment, followed by the threat of being taken to