Psychoanalysis and Its Social Context: A Review Essay of A Psychoanalysis for the People, by Lewis Aron and Karen Starr (2013), Routledge, New York, 442 pages.

Psychoanalysis is often discussed as if it simply sprung from Freud's head as Athena did from Zeus's. This kind of account leaves invisible the larger social and historical context that accounts for much more of the specific characteristics of psychoanalytic theory and practice than is generally acknowledged. The important new book by Lew Aron and Karen Starr, A Psychotherapy for the People: Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis, goes a long way toward correcting this imbalance. Rooted both in a profound knowledge of psychoanalysis as a discipline and in impressive scholarship going beyond the boundaries of the psychoanalytic alone, this is a fascinating read that cannot help but deepen the understanding of the thoughtful reader and challenge some of the shibboleths (a word that in fact features prominently in the book) that have bemused and constrained psychoanalytic thinkers virtually since the field's origins.1

What particularly adds to the importance of this book, and to its contribution, is that by the very act of offering a social and historical perspective on psychoanalysis, it addresses a dimension of human affairs that tends to be fairly radically downplayed in many psychoanalytic accounts (whether they be discussions of particular patients or of the discipline itself), which are often rather devoid of historical or cultural context. Freud's (1914) own history of the psychoanalytic movement is a good example. It is essentially a story of individual characters and evolving ideas, but it is a story without a real setting. Place names appear with some frequency, and even descriptions of where psychoanalysis was and was not well received; but save for stating—apropos the role of the Swiss

school in promoting psychoanalysis in its early years—that “In relation to Western Eu