Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis

In this timely volume, Roger Frie and Pascal Sauvayre have gathered together a series of fascinating essays that take us back to a time when psychoanalysts engaged productively with the social sciences and the social world of their patients. The pioneering explorations of race, sexuality, and human relatedness chronicled here—many of them suppressed and forgotten—offer vivid testimony to the capaciousness and the radical possibilities of the interpersonal perspective in the clinical tradition. Full of unexpected pleasures, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the fate of psychoanalysis in our fractured world.

Elizabeth Lunbeck, Professor of History of Science, Harvard University

The authors of this text have made a tremendous contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis by reviving the early and forgotten contributions made by the Interpersonal School that speak critically to the conformist attitudes and values embedded within our current practice. It provides a critical link for conceptualizing our present racial, political, economic, and social {dis-ease} through a much-needed psychoanalytic lens. This book is well done and needs to be read by early career and senior analysts alike.

Kirkland C. Vaughans, Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University

Finally! An insightful, politically-astute book that demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue for addressing past and present issues of race, class and gender. Contributors look back to the pathbreaking first issue of the journal Psychiatry and examine a range of subjects from assimilation and conformity to criminal justice reform and the contemporary peril of fasicism. Frie and Sauvayre's book should be assigned throughout psychology programs—it is that important to our profession and our society.

Philip Cushman, author of Constructing the Self, Constructing America