You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is hard to know what books to buy these days, but this one will age well on your shelves. More importantly, it is the perfect short textbook for introducing the core of the psychoanalytic model to students of all levels who are new to the field, and can therefore become a staple of courses at the college and postgraduate level.
Elizabeth Auchincloss knows psychoanalysis. She is an expert clinician, curriculum, and psychoanalytic program director, and co-author of the only major textbook in the field, Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, with Eslee Samberg. But she also understands that the important psychoanalytic ideas of the 20th century emerged because real people were talking to each other in a particular time and place, and she loves a good story. So when she takes a “brief romp” through psychoanalytic history and theory, it is just that, the most important historical details and core concepts written in a friendly style that is jargon free, experience near, and relevant to current psychodynamic and psychoanalytic practice. The history of analysis here is as delectable as a good celebrity gossip column, full of details that make the founding of institutes and the emergence of schools of thought culturally lucid and easily absorbed.
Nonetheless, the summary of 120 years of intellectual history is no easy task, particularly when the goal is broadened, as it is here, to demonstrate compatibility of psychoanalytic models with brain-based, cultural, cognitive, and other psychological models (p. xvii). Auchincloss throws this large net to demonstrate the ability of a clinical theory to embrace complexity and avoid the reductive polarizations so common in current psychological thought. From this political stance, she builds a chart that shows the topography, motivation, process, development, pathology, and treatment for different schools of psychoanalytic thought, adding an additional layer of complexity with each chapter so that the student can see how the historical