The emergence of relational psychoanalysis has deepened our appreciation of the social perspectives of Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erich Fromm over the last decade, and a growing number of thinkers have come to reconsider cultural, political, and economic contexts of vulnerability in their conceptions of need, problems in living, and therapeutic practice. Social injustice and inequality have become pressing themes in critiques of psychotherapy, and clinicians continue their efforts to make psychoanalytically oriented treatment more available to the poor as well as racially and ethnically marginalized groups, using realistic, flexible modes of intervention in their attempts to carry out what Donald Winnicott would call “experiments in adapting to need” (Borden, 2006).

Beyond the therapeutic endeavor, thinkers have explored ways in which psychoanalytic points of view deepen our understanding of social problems and potentially inform approaches to political action and