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A book that aspires to create a vision for psychoanalysis to rise above its insular and elitist tendencies is intriguing. Indeed, it is courageous at the present time to conjure a bright future for psychoanalysis based on a critical reading of its own history and on the fantasy, which can be traced back to Freud, of realizing “a psychotherapy for the people.” Lew Aron and Karen Starr are well qualified to guide us in this effort, as he is the author of seminal works on relational psychoanalysis, edits the series on relational psychoanalysis for Routledge (of which this book is part), and is the Director of New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis—one of the few thriving psychoanalytic institutes—while she is the author of a book on psychoanalysis and Judaism, as well as a candidate at the same institution.
Aron and Starr deliver in terms of introducing us to a kind of counterhistory of psychoanalysis, paying attention to a variety of neglected and little-known figures and topics—for example, Rabbi Joshua Liebman, who wrote a best-selling book advocating the integration of psychoanalysis and religion.1 Yet A Psychotherapy for the People is more of a polemical than a scholarly book, borrowing heavily from secondary sources, especially from cultural studies. It has the virtue of never shrinking (pun intended) from passionately defending a consistent set of beliefs.
The main argument of the book is that the binary opposition between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis has had a kind of haunting and limiting effect on much of the history of psychoanalysis, reverberating in a multitude of other, problematic binary oppositions having to do with gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Suggestibility is the underlying