Theorizing the Social in Psychoanalysis: The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens by Neil Altman. (Hillsdale, NJ:  The Analytic Press, 1995)

The widening scope of psychoanalysis seems to shrink back at the point the poor or culturally different come into the picture. With few exceptions (e.g., Langer, 1989), these people have been seen as inappropriate for psychoanalytic therapy. The exclusion of people of lower socioeconomic status from psychoanalytic treatment is mirrored on the theoretical level by the neglect of the influence of social factors on the development of personality. Whether one thinks in terms of the Oedipus complex or selfobject experience, it is as if individual development unfolded in a near social vacuum.

With his new book, The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens, Neil Altman means to challenge these tendencies of thought and practice. Altman argues that, just as psychoanalytic therapy aims to help the individual integrate those aspects of self that have been psychically disowned, much can be added to our collective understanding by bringing into psychoanalytic consideration those people who have traditionally been excluded by our theories and practices. As part of his project of “integrating the social with the psychological” (p. xv), he attempts “to contribute to bringing social class, culture, and race into the psychoanalytic domain” and “to stimulate thinking about the construction of these factors on social and