Spleen and Nostalgia : A Life and Work in Psychoanalysis

In this intellectual memoir, Gedo paints a portrait of American psychoanalysis, its popular peak and its failure to face the complexity of its task, and thus its retreat to schismatic conflict. Interwoven is an accessible presentation of his intellectual work.

John Gedo, Kohut''s heir apparent, chose principle over power when he broke with the self psychology movement to argue for an empirically rigorous, biologically based psychoanalysis. Dr. Gedo brings the sensibility of a Central European intellectual to this memoir of the North American psychoanalytic scene of the past fifty years. He portrays psychoanalysis at its peak, when the discipline commanded academic and popular respect and analysts headed every major department of psychiatry. Telling also of insularity, orthodoxy, guru-making, and self-serving blindness, Gedo shows how things went awry when psychoanalysis failed to face the complexity of its task and retreated to schismatic conflicts; his jeremiad, equally unsparing of himself and his colleagues, indicts the policies and procedures that threaten to destroy psychoanalysis today. Throughout John Gedo''s often very personal odyssey is an accessible presentation of his substantial intellectual work - a complex, scientifically grounded theory of human development, clinical technique, and psychoanalytic change.