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Stephen Frosh, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 262 pp., £14.99 (paperback)
What books can we recommend to someone starting to learn about psychoanalysis and psychotherapy? There are those books which focus on psychoanalysis such as Bateman and Holmes (1995) or Budd and Rusbridger (2005) or, more recently, Milton, Polmear and Fabricius (2010). For a broader approach to psychotherapy, there is no better place to start than the classic text, now in its fourth edition, from Bateman, Brown and Pedder (2010). Or we could suggest a more general introduction to psychoanalytic thinking such as the Talking Cure from the Tavistock Clinic Series (Taylor, 1999) or, my personal favourite, the pithy and wise book by Salzberger-Wittenberg (1973). What these books share in common is that they are written by highly experienced clinicians who are committed to psychoanalytic concepts and to explaining the value of these ideas to a new audience. Even when they acknowledge and address the critiques of psychoanalysis, as Milton et al. do in a thoughtful and respectful way, we know that they are doing so from a particular perspective.
Stephen Frosh, Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, has written an intelligent, informed and engaging book from a third position. He is neither for nor against psychoanalysis but he offers us a vivid and comprehensible account of psychoanalytic theory and its relevance to contemporary thought. He is not writing from a clinical perspective, nor from the standpoint of psychoanalytic devotee. Although he describes himself as writing from ‘a largely sympathetic point of view’, on the first page he states ‘the standing of psychoanalysis as a discipline possessing valid knowledge about human psychology remains uncertain’. Later in the same chapter in a section entitled ‘Precarious psychoanalysis’, he discusses the uncertainty about the future of psychoanalysis and its ‘important weaknesses’ as a discipline. However, at its