Psychoanalysis in Focus

David Livingstone Smith is Director of the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, University of New England, United States

Introduction Scientific Validity in Focus Scientific Support and Therapeutic Outcomes in Focus Hermeneutics in Focus The Unconscious and Free Association in Focus Transference and Countertransference in Focus Integrity in Focus The Future of an Illusion?

`Psychoanalysis in Focus provides an excellent introduction to the basic problems besetting psychoanalytic theory and practice. David Livingstone Smith's lucid survey of the major strands of the critical debate about psychoanalysis fills an important gap in the literature of a discipline not renowned for examining its own shortcomings at a fundamental level' - Allen Esterson, Author of Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Open Court Publishing, 1994) David Livingstone Smith's clearly reasoned iconoclastic account convincingly demonstrates the illusory, quasi-religious status of psychoanalysis unsupported as it currently is by any objective evidence to underwrite the vast bulk of its propositions. If it is to ask meaningful questions about the human mind and find ways to answer them, it will need to evolve into an interdisciplinary science and thereby create links with evolutionary biology, anthropology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience and linguistics' - Ann Casement, Analytical Psychologist, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute `This is a thought provoking and passionately argued book, it is recommended as a thought provoking introduction to some of the key debates' - Journal of Analytical Psychology