Psychoanalysis at the Margins

(Other Press) Stepansky examines the marginalization of psychoanalysis in the world of American mental health care, showing how the field struggles to survive in a post-analytic world of cognitive-behavioral interventions, brief therapy, psychopharmacology, and managed care.   Charting the rise and fall in psychoanalytic book sales since World War II, he uses the virtual disappearance of sustainable psychoanalytic book publishing to comment more broadly about a field that can no longer communicate with itself or with the public at large. Ultimately, he claims that the death of psychoanalytic publishing lies in the fragmentation of psychoanalysis into sub-communities that cannot speak for or to the field as a whole. Stepansky was managing director of the Analytic Press from 1984-2006. He now gives workshops and seminars on clinical writing and writing for publication.