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My first thought on completing my reading of Progress in Psychoanalysis, edited by Steven Axelrod, Ronald Naso, and Larry Rosenberg, was Yeats's observation that “things fall apart; the centre can not hold” from the poem “The Second Coming.” Hard on its associative heels was the auditory impact upon me of Trump's words, “American carnage,” spoken at his presidential inaugural address, one year before this book's publication.
This collection of papers is the third in a series of jeremiads issuing from American psychoanalysts over the past twenty years. From Robert Prince's Death of Psychoanalysis in 1999 to Paul Stepansky's Psychoanalysis at the Margins in 2009, the message continues with this 2018 contribution. I understood my grim reactions to be forward looking, anticipating the next linear point in this sepulchral historical progression.
Without a doubt, Progress in Psychoanalysis is a difficult read. The bleak fact is that two forms of economic woe have afflicted the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the United States: a loss of income-generating potential and a loss of prestige, or social capital. These facts do not escape the overall questions confronting the broader global practice of psychoanalysis, articulated by Andre Green (1975) and widely known for over four decades: (1) questions concerning psychoanalytic therapy and the environment in which it is practiced, (2) questions about social reality and the training models and institutions central to the dissemination of psychoanalytic thinking and action in the education of its