Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst by Barnaby B. Barrett, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019, 281 pp (original) (raw)

2020, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis

wishes to be considered a nihilist, and here I am using the term nihilist as a critical Nietzscheian compliment (Nietzsche, 1882). In the volume under review, Barratt is not concerned with the death of God as found in Nietzsche, but with the function of psychoanalysis within institutes, schools of thought, and as a tool that has the power to aid human life on earth. Here, explicitly linking his thought to Nietzsche's, Barratt's concern is that psychoanalysis is in danger of being dead, and that members of the proverbial marketplace (i.e., many if not most psychoanalysts and institutes) have yet to recognize that such a death has transpired. The extent to which such a proclamation is valid, and the implications of this statement are the concerns of the book under review. Nihilism is often felt to be a negative, and following Keats (2014) many within psychoanalysis find what is negative to be positive (Bion, 1991; Eigen, 1981; Green, 1999). The negative capability that resonates with many psychoanalysts harmonizes with Nietzsche and also Deleuze (1962) in that each points to the creative aspects of destruction once destruction is situated in an ethics of love. Love is understood, at least in part, as a signal of an un-defended openness of being fragile and fallible within a fabric of mutuality (Voela and Rothschild, 2019). Deleuze makes the argument that institutional rigidity is a first case of nihilism that creates conditions for the stasis that demands a loving and creative critique. Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche finds that institutional rigidity may be answered by this second loving nihilism-a creative negative that begins with the indictment that an institution or god is dead. The opening created by such an attack may be without a loving, undefended openness, and therefore an opening may be as misguided as the Nazi's use of Nietzsche. However, with a fallible love, an opening may be as ethical and appropriate as the idealistic yet pragmatic concepts found in the Nuremberg Code and the Hippocratic Oath. It is the opening of what is rigid that concerns Barratt, and the seriousness of his writing affords an astute awareness of the importance of love as openings may be harnessed for good or ill, with or without love. Barratt avows love, and writes of inhabiting the stance that a ''radical psychoanalyst is a friendly gorilla'' (p. 68, italics original) in a manner that reminds me of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's (2007) idea that the poet is a subversive barbarian at the edge of the city, non-violently challenging the toxic status quo. Although I picture a silver-back gorilla, Barratt is playing with Freud's military model, and to that end uses the term gorilla in the manner of a subversively engaged peaceful warrior. This gorilla's work is by no means simple, as Deleuze adds, the challenge to