Psychoanalysis at the Margins. By Paul Stepansky. New York:  Other Press, 2009,  357 pp.

Paul Stepansky has brought us an eloquent and terrifically informative book on the history of the publishing of psychoanalytic books and journals and what this history reveals about the evolving fate of psychoanalysis. As a former editor at the prestigious International Universities Press during the last of its golden years under the leadership of Abram Saulvich Kagan, and then as Managing Director at the popular and dependably excellent The Analytic Press (TAP), overseeing it from 1984 until its demise in 2006, he is perfectly positioned to tell this story. His credentials as a Yale-trained historian of ideas give him the tools he needed to produce this richly researched work. I am pleased that he has used footnotes rather than endnotes, since these too are must-reads. His central thesis is that psychoanalysis has become fragmented, so that now there are not blockbusters as we had in the three decades following World War II, but rather books and journals that address only those who are in a particular psychoanalytic school of thought. The same phenomenon bedevils our journals. And if a book seems unlikely to produce the necessary volume in sales, its price must be increased to ensure covering costs. Of course, a high-priced book is less likely to sell than an inexpensive one. The fate of our books predicts the fate of our psychoanalytic practices; Stepansky's observations are not encouraging. We see sales fall from 100,000 copies to 400 copies. Stepansky's grief is palpable, resonating for me with my grief over the closing of Chestnut Lodge and the almost total loss of asylums in the United States.

Stepansky then documents how our field split apart: orthodox and revisionary, medical and non-M.D., classical, self psychological, lacanian, interpersonal and relational, and so on. First, he takes us through the decades, showing us the sales figures for blockbusters, as he was able to obtain the data, and on into our current era. Next, he takes us through the history of