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Remember Alexander Portnoy, the neurotic New York Jewish intellectual and protagonist of Philip Roth's successful novel, Portnoy's Complaint? Portrayed as the quintessential Oedipal victor, Portnoy is racked with intense castration anxiety and guilt. He yearns for an admirable, triumphant father who can stand up to his intrusive and overstimulating mother. Written in 1969 when Orthodox psychoanalysis was at its zenith, Portnoy conforms to the image of a model analysand. Articulate and seemingly insightful, he attempts to dazzle his silent Freudian analyst with an exhibitionistic discussion of his compulsive sexuality.
How might a contemporary psychoanalyst view Portnoy's symptoms and what treatment strategies would he or she employ? Given the pluralism of our current psychoanalytic community, one would have to present his case to a number of analysts from divergent schools of thought and ask them to imagine how they might treat Portnoy if he were their patient. In Comparing Schools of Analytic Therapy, Peter Buirski successfully poses these questions to representatives from mainstream schools of psychoanalysis. Buirski is attentive to the current tension between advocates of the one-person and two-person psychologies. His book includes 11 authors, with chapters focused in Freudian, ego psychology, Mahlerian, Lacanian, object relations, interpersonal, self psychology and intersubjectivist