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Barnaby Barratt, Routledge, London, 2012, 221 pp., ISBN: 978-0-69273-1; 978-0-415-69274-8; 978-0-203-09505-8
Barnaby Barrett believes that psychoanalysis was derailed in 1915 when Freud, upon Jones’s suggestion, formed a “secret committee” to protect the psychoanalytic turf. From that point forward, according to Barratt, analysis became focused on “keeping the faith” by committing its adherents to an ideology, preventing splinter groups, and consigning heretics to the category of apostasy. It was then that psychoanalysis lost its revolutionary spirit of inquiry and became a dogma, transforming Freud’s interests from the “interrogation of consciousness” to vague metapsychological explanation, resulting in the sectarianism of today’s analytic world.
The essence of the psychoanalytic revolution, for Barratt, was Freud’s discovery of the repressed unconscious and the way to “interrogate” it by free association. He endorses Freud’s statement that analysis is defined by its method of inquiry, not by content. When the process is permitted to flower, the four “coordinates” of analytic thought emerge: the repressed unconscious; the importance of personal history; Oedipal complexities; and bodily sensuality. Every post-1914 emendation to analytic thought, in Barratt’s view, is guilty of losing connection with the free associational method and at least three of the four “coordinates,” thereby watering down the power of Freud’s original ideas.
Most of the book is devoted to asserting the importance of the four coordinates and their role in the revolutionary process of psychoanalysis and to assailing all extant analytic schools for missing the essence of Freud’s revolution. According to Barratt, the maintenance of that spirit means openness to the polysemous nature of meaning as well as to polysexuality and pluritemporality. For example, he argues that psychoanalysis reveals that sexuality is inherently polymorphous, and it is only bourgeois ideology that constricts it to an endpoi