Why has American psychoanalysis been so thoroughly marginalized in the world of American mental health care? And what does its flight to the margins tell us about the field, its practitioners, and our culture of healing? In Psychoanalysis at the Margins, Stepansky sums up three decades of experience as an editor and publisher in the field and offers a historical examination of why psychoanalysis has all but lost its publishing arm and even now struggles to survive in a postanalytic world of cognitive-behavioral interventions, brief therapy, psychopharmacology, and managed care. Beyond its self-evident importance to psychoanalysts and other proponents of “talking” therapy, the book provides an in-depth case study of the role of books, journals, and publishing in the rise and fall of a small, historically insular profession. It thereby provides a microcosm of the crisis of small scholarly and professional publishing in an era that has witnessed the ascendancy of Internet chat groups, online seminars, Amazon.com, and electronic journal subscriptions. This book tells a cautionary story of the inevitable marginalization of any profession that resists integration into the scientific mainstream and, in the process, denigrates the methods and procedures of normal science and the idea of progress enshrined in them. By positioning present-day psychoanalysis as an alternative healing modality in the tradition of homeopathy, osteopathy, naturopathy, and chiropractic, Stepansky is able to explore the clinical and nonclinical initiatives that enabled such professions to survive and even thrive in the face of mainstream opposition. Is it possible, he asks, that the experience of alternative medicine may yet enable psychoanalysis to optimize its marginality and draw the mainstream to it? About the Author: Paul E. Stepansky, Ph.D., was Managing Director of The Analytic Press from 1984 to 2006. He has been personal editor to Heinz Kohut, Margaret Mahler, and other psychoanalytic luminaries past and present, and is Interdisciplinary Research Faculty in the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. |