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Lewis Aron and Karen Starr explore the development of psychoanalysis in Europe and the United States, not as a straightforward chronological history, but in the spirit of Freud's nonlinear Nachträglichkeit, translated as “afterwardness” (p. xv). Freud observed how memory is fluid, past and present influence each other, and subsequent development is affected by the re-working of earlier events, especially when there has been trauma. You might say that Aron and Starr engage in psychoanalyzing psychoanalysis, uncovering and reworking early dissociated experiences, unconscious and disavowed attitudes that are embedded in psychoanalytic theory and practice, with the goal of increasing consciousness and integration. The integration they envision is a broad, inclusive definition of psychoanalysis that will preserve and transmit the value of the “analytic attitude” while eliminating objectionable assumptions, particularly those that are misogynous and anti-Semitic.
Aron and Starr are affiliated with the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Lewis Aron as its director since 1998. His extensive contributions to relational psychoanalytic theory will be well-known to readers. He also edits The Psychoanalysis and Jewish Life Book Series. I had not been aware of Karen Starr's work before, but note that her earlier book is about Jewish mysticism and psychoanalysis. Their examination of the impact of Jewishness and anti-Semitism upon psychoanalysis is a dominant theme of the book. Both are strongly identified with relational psychoanalysis and suggest that some of the biases that kept classical psychoanalysis from progressing have already been loosened and reworked in contemporary relational theory.
Subsections in the introductory chapter convey the shape of the book: Treatment versus Care, Autonomy versus Relationality, The Dialectics of Marginality, Psychoanalytic Harms, and Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis. Regarding marginality, Aron and