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Aron and Starr are hoping to rescue psychoanalysis from becoming a relic of the past by projecting a vision of a progressive psychoanalysis that is “for the people,” open-minded, flexible, innovative, and broadly inclusive of differing theories and techniques. Such transformation, the authors believe, requires a serious confrontation with its own errors and misguided attitudes, especially its tendency to build on polarizing concepts that create restrictive boundaries, which are detrimental to growth. The polarizing concept that they consider most limiting is the binary psychoanalysis versus psychotherapy. The authors write: “No one has systematically shown how psychoanalysis was defined in contrast to psychotherapy, or why the two have been viewed as incompatible and contradictory. The implications are profound” (p. 7). Psychoanalysis is associated with deep change, psychotherapy is superficial; psychoanalysis aims at insight, psychotherapy offers support; psychoanalysis effects internal change, psychotherapies manipulate the external environment. Freud wanted his therapy to be seen as objective, scientific, and universal, and not due to suggestion.
The authors point to many other binaries that invariably display a hierarchical value system. These binaries haunt the profession and exist as underlying prejudices deeply embedded in our fundamental concepts. The book is an intellectual and selective cultural history that accents various aspects that have shaped the development of psychoanalysis. The authors illuminate the polarizing style of binary thinking typical of the traditional style of Western thought. They trace the development of psychoanalysis in the United States as a sub-specialty of psychiatry and, more than any other factor, they stress how much