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Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions: The Dilemma of a Profession, by Jurgen Reeder. Other Press, New York, 2004, pp. 308, $30.00.
Jurgen Reeder, an experienced Swedish psychoanalytic practitioner, educator, and administrator, has turned his attention to the structure of formal psychoanalytic education within Institutes and arrives at some harsh indictments of the profession and its embedded training practices. Reeder's "study" (probably more accurately an exhaustive review of the psychoanalytic literature on training issues) leads him to several alarming conclusions about the prospects for the profession and to fairly radical recommendations intended to avert his pessimistic forecast.
In the course of this generally well written, but at times excessively wordy and rambling tome, Reeder reviews some fascinating psychoanalytic history and discusses the training analysis and culture of training Institutes in greater detail than I have previously encountered in a single work of this size. Central to and dominating this work is the author's introduction of the concept of "the superego complex",...