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Rosalind Minsky' new book is a comprehensive overview of the interplay between psychoanalytic and cultural theories applied to the analysis of change in contemporary societies. Minsky, a senior lecturer in the department of Arts and Letters in the Anglia Polytechnic University, is well acquainted with up-to-date modern, postmodern and feminist
literature, especially in their British formulations. I found her book both enjoyable and frustrating. On the enjoyable front, the author has a detailed knowledge of a wide range of psychoanalytic theories that are rarely presented together, from Freudian, to object relations (Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Wright, Bollas), to Lacanian and feminist. She combines this with an analysis of the interplay between unconscious process, personal experience, and social change. This makes reading her book a creative challenge.
Minsky' book is a valuable contribution to the tradition of British object relations theory that looks at the links between psyche and social organization. Her views of culture go beyond the traditional analysis of language, symbols, and religion used by anthropologists to include social organizations and cultural representations of gender. Her interdisciplinary concerns are especially important at a time when psychoanalysis is attacked for its universalistic assumptions and use of a patriarchal metalanguage.
The author does not use clinical case studies to understand how culture mediates complex psychic processes, but rather explores the relevance of psychoanalytic orientations to show the interaction between unconscious mechanisms and the social environment. She is especially interested in an analysis of the crafting of a gendered sense of identity within specific sociohistorical contexts.
The book is organized in two parts. Early chapters provide a review of major psychoanalytic approaches, summarizing key ideas of Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan. The second half provides psychoanalytic tools to rethink and ma