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Eli Zaretsky's engaging new book, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, presents a persuasive argument for the intimate and mutually reciprocal role that psychoanalysis has played, in its multiple and shifting forms, in the intellectual, political, and philosophical developments of the twentieth century, and posits certain psychoanalytic ideas as both the intellectual driving force and the most adept explanatory paradigm for modernity itself. The work is detailed, vivid, and exhaustively researched.
Zaretsky presents a thick contextual background for psychoanalytic ideas and delineates the multiplicity of ways in which psychoanalytic thinkers drew from and influenced their various cultures. Ranging broadly—geographically as well as temporally— Zaretsky discusses, in addition to developments in Europe and the United States, psychoanalytic movements in Asia, India, Turkey, and Japan; his expansive work includes thorough treatments of various fascinating historical moments, such as the role psychoanalysis played in African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance, in communist Hungary, and in the 1960s counterculture in the United States. Both swoopingly panoramic and richly detailed, Secrets of the Soul presents a picture of psychoanalysis as embattled, fragmented, and imperiled, and sets out both to rehistoricize it and to argue for its relevance to current times.
Provocatively describing psychoanalysis in his introduction as “a pseudoscience whose survival is now very much in doubt” (p. 3), Zaretsky attempts a salvage operation, and this, more than a history, seems to be the core of his ambitious work. Zaretsky came to Freud from his involvement in the New Left in the 1960s, and he “aims to identify and affirm the emancipatory dimension of analytic thought” (p. 3). While the voyage the work takes is always an interesting one, and casts light on some less well-known manifestations and applications of psychoanalytically derived idea