Psychoanalysis at The Margins by Paul E. Stepansky, New York:  Other Press, 2009,  384 pp., $39.00.

For more than two decades, there have been conferences and publications about psychoanalysis' being in a crisis. None of these calls has led to a radical reorganization or reorientation of psychoanalysis. The result has been that psychoanalysis has become marginal: if in the 1960s a large percentage of professorships in psychiatry were held by psychoanalysts, now there are practically none. There are hardly any graduate programs in clinical psychology that are psychoanalytically oriented, and there are very few professorships in psychology that are in the hands of psychoanalysts. And while there are still many psychoanalytic institutes that succeed in attracting candidates, there are almost no patients left that come for classical psychoanalysis.

Paul Stepansky was publisher of The Analytic Press, one of the last houses devoted to psychoanalytic publishing for almost two decades, until it closed and moved its titles to publishing giant Taylor and Francis. In Psychoanalysis at the Margins, Stepansky (2009) tells the story of the marginalization through the lens of publishing and by making use of his training as historian.

Stepansky's organizing frame of reference is a historiographie story of great importance. He claims that psychoanalysis did not manage the transition toward normal science which characterizes disciplines that settle into a cumulative, progressive trajectory.

Thomas S. Kuhn's (1962) classical The Structure of Scientific Revolution, has become the canonic philosophical and sociological framework for the understanding of the history of science. Kuhn showed that scientific disciplines become successful when they coalesce around a scientific paradigm. Such paradigms include a metaphysics of science, that is, a number of basic assumptions about the basic constituents of the field of inquiry. In physics, the most spectacularly successful modern science, this means that the world is composed of a number of basic constituents (particles, fields) that can be des