In this intelligently edited collection of essays, John Burnham has assembled works focused on the intersection between the United States—as a nationality, a culture, and a shifting social and historical context—and psychoanalysis. Burnham makes a convincing argument for the need to revisit this unwieldy and important topic without engaging in the polemics and politics that have marred earlier scholarship and limited our understanding.

To the extent that an uneasy fear that psychoanalysis has become “irrelevant at the turn of the millennium” coexists along with the idea that “perhaps much of psychoanalysis had simply become absorbed into American culture to such an extent that it had become untraceable” (p. 20), these essays help the reader to retrace, in effect, the circumstances in which the United States first encountered psychoanalysis, as well as the permutations, adaptations, and vicissitudes of this ongoing, conflicted relationship.