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Barnaby Barratt opens his provocative book with a broadside against all of the major contemporary schools of psychoanalysis. He worries that, far from an indicator of health, the profusion of psychoanalytic schools has produced “theoretical bedlam” and such a large tent that “the rubric of ‘psychoanalysis’ has become virtually meaningless” (p. xiv). Barratt argues for a return of psychoanalysis to its fundamental Freudian roots. He is scornful of the orthodoxies of analytic training institutes that, all too often, are exclusively concerned with externalities (e.g., frequency of session, use of the couch), and with indoctrination of candidates into an unquestioning allegiance to authority. This, he argues, is antithetical to a genuinely psychoanalytic turn of mind. Barratt is concerned with the ossification of the field and with a legendarily disputatious culture in which analysts of different persuasions “become rabidly condescending or dismissive toward each other” (p. 8). Ironically, Barratt, himself, is an equal opportunity critic, and none of the existing schools of psychoanalysis escapes his wrath. He sums up his critique thus:
Indeed, the history of the psychoanalytic movement through the 20th century provides an appalling spectacle of in-groups and tightly knit clubs fighting with each other, of internecine rivalries, backbiting and name-calling that is only thinly veiled in professional courtesy, of rampant authoritarianism, of politically motivated expulsions and the formation of counter-organizations, and thus of proliferative organizational splitting (p. 5).
Barratt's book is a call for a return to a “vivacious engagement” with the kind of inquiry that ought to constitute the core of psychoanalysis. Sadly, while Barratt calls for a return to the foundational ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis, he acknowledges that Freud's constitution of the Secret Committee in 1912 to police doctrinal orthodoxy and ensure his legacy, laid the groundwork for the development o