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Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction is the second of four books by Anthony Elliott, Research Fellow in political science at the University of Melbourne, each one surveying the contemporary field of psychoanalytic social and cultural theory and critique. Elliott's earlier Social Theory & Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva (Blackwell, 1992) seems to be the expanded version of Psychoanalytic Theory, the two books are organized almost identically, but Psychoanalytic Theory is by contrast a summation—fewer theorists are discussed and fewer details of the theories presented are included. Elliott's third book, co-edited with Stephen Frosh, is a collection of essays entitled Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (Routledge, 1995); contributors include Elliott, Frosh, some of the major theorists discussed in Elliott's first two books (Castoriadis, Chodorow, J. Benjamin, Kovel, Sprengnether, Rustin), and others (Sayers, Segal, Dews, Macey). The redundancy I identify is intended not as a criticism, but as an indication that Psychoanalytic Theory is indeed an introduction and that substantial elucidations of Elliott's views and of some of those he introduces are available in the other two books.
Elliott seeks a middle ground for psychoanalytic social theory between traditional and postmodern psychoanalytic strategies. Traditionally, the “focus on self-mastery and adaptation in ego psychology” (21) leads to an uncritical social conformism, while the tendency in object relations theory “to project self-development as the unfolding of a human essence” (24) ends up politically conservative. However, the “radical break with this search for self-coherence and autonomy” made by Lacan, by Deleuze and Guattari, and by Lyotard are just as unsettling for the analyst of culture concerned with human emancipation: Lacan's symbolic order appears monolithic and deterministic (30, 32); Deleuze and Guattari's “romanticized accoun