Psychoanalytic Culture

`Ian Parker has made a major contribution to the phenomenon of psycho-analysis and the psycho-analytic movement... This is an exhaustive and convincing exposition of the relativity of psycho-analysis - relative to culture relative to history and relative to language... Ian Parker's text is beautifully clear and ranges across a very wide cultural landscape from the Frankfurt school to ego-psychology to post-structuralism new age body-piercing to the British Psychological Society from Classical Freud to the post-modern individual from the Lacanian return to Kleinian social science. It is always informative and digestible and always to the point - psycho-analysis has created a wide social discourse which entraps thought in conformist patterns appropriate to our times. Parker's range of views upon that happy harmony strives for a critical purchase upon it and ultimately subversion of it' - Professor Robert D Hinshelwood Centre for Psycho-Analytic Studies University of Essex