In the last twenty years, psychoanalysis has been intrigued by some enduring topics and has scrutinized them with increasing sophistication. Matters of culture, gender, neurobiology, self-states, and the profound complexities of relationships have riveted the attention of theorists and practitioners, and new models of treatment and additional theories of pathogenesis have emerged. Of the recent trends that have captured the interests of psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, this volume focuses on postmodern psychoanalysis. The contributors are advocates, critics, interested observers–all of whom share an open, scholarly interest in this contemporary phenomenon.

The thirteen contributors to Way Beyond Freud engage the reader in a stimulating exchange and dialogue about the postmodern turn in psychoanalysis. They advocate, critique or simply observe this contemporary phenomenon with superb scholarship Postmodern psychoanalysis is neither a unified school nor a body of thought but its antecedents can be found in a wide range of authors from Ferenczi to Sullivan who disdain reductionism, reject the concept of neutrality and support a two-person psychology.

Way Beyond Freud is a cutting-edge dialectic written by noted authorities. Readers will be stimulated, and informed about a vital contemporary subject. (514 pp.)

Reviews

In his ten years of editorship of Psychoanalytic Books and in his tenure as editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Reppen has devoted his career to promoting the virtue and value of psychoanalytic pluralism. Schulman, in fifteen years of service as editor of the Psychoanalytic Review, has shepherded through many noteworthy publications that would surely not have seen the light of day, were it not for his principled reluctance to participate in partisan psychoanalytic politics. And Tucker’s years of editorship at Harcourt Brace and devotion to nurturing quality scholarship surely come through in the last volume. The field owes a great debt to these people.

Jon Mills