Description
Book SynopsisThis pioneering ethnography of psychoanalysis focuses on Chicago, a historically important location in the development and institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the United States, in order to examine the nexus of theory, practice, and institutional form in the original instituting of psychoanalysis, its normalization, and now its "crisis."
Trade Review“Schechter’s brilliant study combines ethnography and intellectual history to explore how psychoanalysis is practiced today…. Schechter poignantly illustrates arguments about precarity pioneered by scholars such as Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant. This book is required reading for humanists, social scientists, social workers, and therapists…. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” -- D. Stuber * Choice *
“Schechter’s text is an interdisciplinary feat that combines ethnography with archival research to chronicle the crisis of American psychoanalysis as it adapts to an industrialized, neoliberal health system, governed by insurability, standardization, ‘flexible specialization,’, and ‘medically necessary’ services. …
Illusions of the Future is a remarkable contribution to the history and anthropology of the ‘psy’ sciences, and Schechter opens up a world of possibility for further ethnographically analyzing this discipline.” -- Julia Gruson-Wood * Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences *
‘This book is a multifaceted gem. … Schechter helps us to understand traumatically induced change in the theory, organization, and practice of psychoanalysis in the U.S. Her book is implicitly a stinging critique of the harm managed care has done to analysts and patients alike.” -- Howard F. Stein * Journal of Anthropological Research *
“For anybody interested in psychoanalysis, its institutions, history, theory, practices and personnel, this book makes a significant contribution that should have some (possibly even beneficial!) effects upon, and for, contemporary practitioners themselves. More generally, the book also contains incisive and interesting interpretations that bespeak the ongoing impact of biopolitical domination upon the mental health professions more generally — and should therefore also attract the attention of a wider audience.” -- Justin Clemens * Society & Space *
"A keenly observed and elegantly written account . . . A sophisticated and nuanced ethnography." -- Silvia Posocco * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part I. The Slippery Object and the Sticky Libido 1. An Imaginary of Threat and Crisis 19 2. Analysis Deferred (or, the Talking Cure Talks Back) 51 Part II. The Problem of Psychoanalytic Authority 3. Instituting Psychoanalysis in Chicago: Two Pedagogies of Desire 73 4. Professionalization and Its Discontents: The Theory of Obedience and the Drama of "Never Splitting" 95 Part III. Psychoanalysis and the Declensions of Verisimilitude 5. The Plenty of Scarcity: On Crisis and Transience in the Fifty-First Ward 123 6. On Narcissism: "Our Own Developmental Line" 161 Notes 189 References 221 Index 267
