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These two provocatively-titled volumes are worthy British contributions dealing with psychoanalysis and philosophical issues. The first describes a personal and clinical struggle with the ethics of practice. The second confronts the most difficult questions facing psychoanalysis as a discipline. R. D. Hinshelwood, a well known Kleinian analyst, presents a defense and redefinition of the moral position of psychoanalytic treatment in the face of existential questions about the ethics of influence. Stephen Frosh, a scholar/therapist, offers a more wide-ranging evaluation of psychoanalysis as science, as treatment, and as critical social discourse.
Hinshelwood begins with an account of his conflict over the coercive nature of the psychiatric practice of his training days, and his attraction to the alternatives of the therapeutic community, antipsychiatry, and psychoanalysis. He reflects upon his development of a treatment philosophy grounded in Kleinian ideas. Frosh, in a well documented and tightly argued exposition, evaluates with remarkable objectivity the extensive criticisms to which psychoanalysis has been subjected in the past quarter century. Pulling no punches, yet avoiding the rancor of the Freud bashers, Frosh is successful in preserving much that he finds good and useful. His conclusion supports his title. He is, and we are persuaded to be, both for and against psychoanalysis.
Hinshelwood reviews moral positions in psychoanalytic theory and practice since Freud, for whom the discovery of truth was both the aim and its own moral justification. With Freud's redefinition