Analysis Terminable and Postponed

"What is psychoanalysis, if what one's colleagues are doing, always, is not it?" (10). One of several questions driving Kate Schechter's sharp critique of psychoanalysis, especially as it's been taught and practiced in Chicago for several decades, Illusions of a Future puts psychoanalysis in the context of a "biopolitics of desire" involving managed care, medication, and the neoliberal expectations often tied to both. The "illusions" in the book's title are chiefly those of the analysts, Schechter concludes, with a strong implication that the future of psychoanalysis in the United States might itself become quixotic and illusory, given a multitude of changes in treatment, including in the "quick-fix, medication-centered world of managed behavioral health" (1).

Schechter—herself a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and medical anthropologist at Rush University Medical College, Chicago—builds her critique and intervention on the compromises that the analysts she interviewed feel compelled to adopt and the predicaments in which they report finding themselves, among them "an atmosphere of scarce work" and the need to maintain a regular practice, for themselves as for their patients (3). This in turn raises questions as to whether what they facilitate clinically may still be thought psychoanalytic, in the sense of involving free association and several sessions per week, to practice a treatment with national protocols, specialty textbooks, and a long, complex history, not least in Chicago itself. Building on both archival and ethnographic research, Schechter's book examines the broader implications of those adjustments for psychoanalysis nationally, including in its relation to psychiatry, to patients, and to biopolitics more generally.

Schechter's intervention, described by her as "rethink[ing] biopolitics with renovated psychoanalytic resources" (8), draws heavily on the work of Jacques Derrida and of Michel Foucault, in ways that might initially surprise, given a long-inherited assumption that especially Foucauldian and psychoanalytic perspectives on desire and biopolitics are inimical and impossible to resolve. Yet as Schechter helpfully underscores, with support from Foucault's extensive references to psychoanalysis, including his clear, repeated differentiation of Freudianism from the normalizing aims of biological psychiatry, Foucault "granted psychoanalysis … [an] axial position … in the transition from classical sovereignty to liberal governmentality" (8). The approach to "reading psychoanalysis in terms of biopolitics" is thus in one sense a significant adjustment for critical theory in the United States, holding considerable promise as a way of engaging empirically with what Schechter terms "local catalogs of resistances," including in the consulting room (10).

Quite surprisingly underexamined in her book, Schechter herself "underwent training in psychoanalysis" in the same community of analysts she writes about ethnographically, and she continues to serve as a faculty member of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, an institution of which she is rather critical in the book (14). It therefore isn't clear if the analysts interviewed were also former teachers or remain her colleagues. It would have been fascinating to read a fuller account involving her own self-definition as an analyst and theorist, including the ways that she navigates this complex terrain, with and without patients.

Schechter's ethnography of psychoanalysis in Chicago—as represented chiefly by its Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Society, two organizations with a long-standing, seemingly intractable rivalry—is nonetheless made analogous to shifts in a more abstract but inescapable "biopolitics of desire" that for several decades has been reshaping the country as a whole. Problems and deficiencies in the local are thus given much wider implication in Illusions of a Future, including for psychoanalysis nationally. "So how do today's analysts maintain themselves as analysts," Schechter asks rhetorically of the gauntlet she lays down at the outset, "when they do not—cannot—practice what they preach?" (179).

Her contention is forceful, at times withering, but finally incomplete; it points to difficulties in the United States (perhaps especially the Midwest) that work less successfully as examples for, say, Europe, Asia (including Australia), and South America: "They give up analysis precisely in their efforts to maintain themselves as psychoanalysts, substituting an imaginary of objective need...