Understanding Dissidence and Controversy in the History of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Martin S. Bergmann. New York:  Other Press, 2004.  396 pp.

The centerpiece of this book—an edited volume on dissidence in psychoanalysis—is a long review essay by Martin Bergmann. From his own unique vantage point, Bergmann charts the chief dissident voices over the past psychoanalytic century. The advantages of Bergmann's history, maturity, and perspective are enormous. He knew and studied with some of the main characters, and lived through most of the periods of controversy

after Freud's death. He has long had a keen historian's eye directed toward psychoanalysis. The experience of reading his chapter is very particular: you are taking a slow, careful walk through many ideas and time periods, examining different networks of colleagues and wary competitors. I never felt I was being told how to think on this journey, but rather given various tools with which to think. At the same time, Bergmann has a point of view; we know what he thinks and why, and we can come to our own conclusions.

What makes this review essay so potent, in my mind, is not simply its breadth, or the personal links to authors and ideas, but rather the radical agenda Bergmann sets for considering dissidence. Taking not only a historical approach but also a dynamic and nonlinear one, Bergmann sees the history of dissidence as integral to the development of psychoanalysis. He watches as ideas are jettisoned and rejected in one period, only to reappear in another period, as altered forms within the canon in ways that renew and deepen the central projects of psychoanalysis. As mentioned, Bergmann's sense of history is nonlinear, as though psychoanalysis is moving and evolving through a series of instances of nachträglichkeit—moves that alter past as well as present.

This approach has many advantages. Eschewing the approaches of others, such as Wallerstein (a homogenized, common-ground approach) and the more strictly boundaried approach of Green, Bergmann's strategy keeps difference and convention in constantly renewing tension. Bergmann is free to have opinio