If prizes were given for ideas per page, Eli Zaretsky's Political Freud would win going away. In this relatively short book, he explores the fate of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century as it went from being a dominant way of understanding the self and the world to a theoretical stepchild by the last two decades of the century. One reason for this, he thinks, is the triumph of a consumer society that gradually undermined the need for psychoanalysis due to the culture-wide “loss of unconscious mental life” (4). Specifically, the 1980s saw the triumph of neoliberalism, an ideology that linked the free market, the minimal state and individual self-realization, often through consumption. All of these developments, in their way, were inimical to a theory of the self that emphasized the unconscious and/or the conflict-laden nature of individual and group interaction. No longer was the ego set against the id; rather it was self as related to the world. Emphasis fell not on vertical domination but on horizontal conformity. The object was no longer to cure classical neuroses but to manage narcissism and borderline disturbances. All these developments reflected a shift beyond the central message of classical psychoanalysis.

Zaretsky does all this in a series of five fast-moving chapters which explore the contribution of the psychoanalytic tradition to reenforcing and questioning the status quo. It proposed critiques of consumer capitalism; analysed American racism and the therapeutics of violence and memory issuing from the black world; suggested pre- and post-Holocaust understandings of Jewish identity and ethnicity; contributed to a new understanding of the ego/self/subject, beginning with the experience of shell shock in World War I; and was used in the ideologies of liberation, especially the New Left and feminism, which emerged in the 1960s. But whereas the tagline “Freud, Our Contemporary” was roughly accurate from the beginning of the twentieth century down into the 1970s, such was no longer the case after that.

Interestingly, a barely disguised co-theme of the book concerns the periodic “return of the repressed” of psychoanalysis. All has not been totally lost. Beginning in the 1960s the thinkers associated with feminism praised, then picked over the corpse of, psychoanalysis, and even pronounced it dead and buried at various times. But they could never quite leave Freud alone. Film theory was dominated for decades by Jacques Lacan, the bizarre but vastly influential psychoanalyst, who developed a French version of the theory of narcissism. Narcissism also emerged almost as a central concept of mainstream psychoanalytic thought, a development ably traced by Liz Lunbeck in her The Americanization of Narcissism (2014).

But one major problem with Political Freud is the general Americo-centrism of the book, despite the attention Zaretsky pays to Lacan and the French Freudians. He also neglects Freud's influence in critical literary and cultural studies, which owed much to French thought, and slights the internal shift in importance from Herbert Marcuse to Theodor Adorno in the work of successive generations of the Frankfurt school. Yet, to his credit, Zaretsky pays ample attention to British-based object relations theory from the 1930s to the 1950s, a movement which provided the basis for the relational self to replace the (allegedly) closed ego of orthodox Freudianism. Still, it would have at least been useful had he placed more emphasis upon what happened to European ideas when they came to America – or Latin America or wherever else the psychoanalytic tradition gained a toehold in the last century.

Valuable as Zaretsky's narrativization of the psychoanalytic tradition is, what Philip Rieff named the “analytic” and then the “therapeutic” attitudes in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) deserves more attention as early versions of what Zaretsky calls the postwar “maturity ethic.” Beyond that, Zaretsky pays surprisingly little attention to the countercultural revolt of the 1960s and early 1970s. When he does mention it, it is as a subset of New Left thinking. In fact, there was considerable tension between the two movements. Furthermore, the trend toward the abandonment of depth psychology and the new importance of relationality and the interpersonal was clearly anticipated by David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950), a massive insight for which Riesman deserves more credit.

Overall, however, these are relatively minor matters in what is a tour de force of historical reconstruction. Zaretsky's thesis – that we need a revival of the critical aspects of the psychoanalytic tradition – is certainly worth considering. Whether there are still untapped resources in the psychoanalytic tradition that can fuel a new challenge to the status quo is another matter.