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Jurgen Reeder has delivered a bombshell in a plain brown wrapper. The wrapper is a scholarly literature review, to explore “a certain form of inhibiting structure that seems to arise easily within certain professional cultures” (p. 3), including psychoanalytic institutions. Reeder, a training analyst at the Swedish Psychoanalytical
Association, wrote this book on a research grant from the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Although he leaves us with no question about his own position, he lets others speak for him as often as he speaks for himself. There are twenty-seven pages of endnotes and a 31-page bibliography that add to the (false) first impression of a dry scholarly work.
The bombshell is that this carefully reasoned project is a compelling indictment of the way psychoanalysis has been taught for the past eighty years. Reeder defines an analyst's “professional superego” and an “institutional superego system” that together constitute a “psychoanalytic superego complex” that is perpetuated by analytic institutions. He argues that “through the presence of a superego complex the institutions have a tendency to betray the very analytical spirit for whose promotion they have been devised” (p. 6).
This conclusion is not new, as Reeder acknowledges; in fact, his exposition follows several thinkers who have propounded similar ideas. Balint, Bernfeld, Arlow, Dorn, Kernberg, Cremerius, Dulchin and Segal, and Gitelson, among others, are cited repeatedly in a book that contains close to 400 referenced papers. In terms of its findings, this book might be seen as the cautious older brother to François Roustang's wilder and more impetuous book, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan (also cited by Reeder).1 It is as if Reeder has taken Roustang's sweeping conclusion— that psychoanalysis is so personal that the term psychoanalytic society is a contradiction in terms—and done the careful work of making and updating the case behind it.
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