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Barnaby Barratt's three volume set—comprised of What Is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years After Freud's ‘Secret Committee’ (2013), Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free Associative Praxis (2016), and Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst (2019)—is difficult to evaluate. Over the years Barratt has been single minded in his emphasis on the importance of free association for an understanding of the radical potential of psychoanalysis both as a practice and as a science. He has always drawn on both analytic and philosophical registers in order to portray the profound nature of the Freudian revolution as he sees it, and he has, since the appearance of Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing in 1984, been a maverick without any allegiance to any particular analytic tradition. This has allowed him to cultivate a unique and prolific voice operating outside the professional mainstream. With these three volumes, Barratt's project comes fully into focus. Conceived as a trilogy, it is invigorating in its creative originality and in terms of the massive critique it performs with regard to the current state of the discipline. At the same time, the project often tends towards being so idiosyncratic in its presentation that it risks not being able to contact the audience to which it aspires. The level of engagement it provoked in me was equal to the amount of reservation I felt while reading these three books in succession.
The first volume is the most cogently argued and states clearly the central motif of all that follows. As the volumes progress, however, the author's seemingly endless theoretical commitments and ambitious efforts to demonstrate an impossible wealth of knowledge tends to undermine the project's central message. Let me state my initial impression bluntly from the outset: these are very good books, and they deserve to be read—but cautiously. I found myself at first excited by their critical audacity, and by their recommendations for the future o