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The Couch in the Marketplace: Psychoanalysis and Social Reality

Author(s) : H. Shmuel Erlich

Reviews and Endorsements

‘This wonderfully engaging and stimulating account of work across the “frontier” of psychoanalysis and social reality is a major, and at times highly original, contribution to understanding the interplay of dynamics within and between the individual, the group and the socio-cultural field, both organisational and political. In perhaps the book’s central chapter, “Discourse with the Enemy”, Dr Erlich refers to the need to “learn to think of enmity as spanning internal and external reality, the subjective inner world and the objective environment”. More generally, it is just such a “learning to think”, at and across these boundaries that marks both what this book describes and what it invites. As such it is a signal challenge to all of us working on either side of the frontier.’
- David Armstrong, Associate Consultant, Tavistock Consultancy Service

‘When we look at the world around us, we can become really frightened. But our fears come from our minds, our bodies, and our developmental histories. So how do we know when we are afraid that we are accurately grasping reality? H. Shmuel Erlich’s brilliant effort to link what is in our minds with our outer world perceptions opens the possibility of a more complex engagement in our lives. Using the tools of psychoanalysis and social systems theory, he brings us from the intimacies of the consulting room to the Gulf War, the paranoid organization, the mind of the terrorist, the corrupt social system. He illuminates the fluid boundaries between external and internal reality. How do we move from the experience of an enemy we must destroy to one we believe we might talk with? How does the commitment to something larger than the self contribute to the creation of terrorists? These are not trivial questions. This fascinating book is relevant to all those who take the risk of living fully in our chaotic social world.’
- Edward R. Shapiro, MD, former Medical Director/CEO, Austen Riggs Center; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Center

‘In this book the Israeli psychoanalyst H. Shmuel Erlich examines human identity and links between internal and external living. His motivation comes from his own life experiences from childhood on, crossing political and geographical boundaries, sometimes under dangerous conditions. His psychoanalytic observations are coupled with insights derived from Open Systems theory and his vast experiences in the Group Relations approach. He covers a wide range of topics: Sigmund Freud’s struggle integrating his Jewish identity with other identities in Vienna, connections between intrapsychic and external enemies, wounded societies, prejudice and paranoia in groups, and the terrorist mind. His personal recollections of conducting psychoanalysis during the Gulf War in 1990-1991, a time when there were horrifying expectations that Iraqi missiles with biological or chemical warheads would hit Israel, are most moving. This book is written by a pioneer in illustrating clearly how psychoanalysis can and should reach wider audiences. It should be read not only by clinicians and psychoanalytic educators, but everyone who wishes to obtain deeper understanding of how societal and political events impact the human mind, as individuals and also as members of small or large groups.’
- Vamık D. Volkan, MD, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, University of Virginia; Senior Erik Erikson Scholar, the Austen Riggs Center; and author of Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace