“Schechter’s brilliant study combines ethnography and intellectual history to explore how psychoanalysis is practiced today…. Schechter poignantly illustrates arguments about precarity pioneered by scholars such as Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant. This book is required reading for humanists, social scientists, social workers, and therapists…. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”
-- D. Stuber Choice
“Schechter’s text is an interdisciplinary feat that combines ethnography with archival research to chronicle the crisis of American psychoanalysis as it adapts to an industrialized, neoliberal health system, governed by insurability, standardization, ‘flexible specialization,’, and ‘medically necessary’ services. … Illusions of the Future is a remarkable contribution to the history and anthropology of the ‘psy’ sciences, and Schechter opens up a world of possibility for further ethnographically analyzing this discipline.”
-- Julia Gruson-Wood Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
‘This book is a multifaceted gem. … Schechter helps us to understand traumatically induced change in the theory, organization, and practice of psychoanalysis in the U.S. Her book is implicitly a stinging critique of the harm managed care has done to analysts and patients alike.”
-- Howard F. Stein Journal of Anthropological Research
“For anybody interested in psychoanalysis, its institutions, history, theory, practices and personnel, this book makes a significant contribution that should have some (possibly even beneficial!) effects upon, and for, contemporary practitioners themselves. More generally, the book also contains incisive and interesting interpretations that bespeak the ongoing impact of biopolitical domination upon the mental health professions more generally — and should therefore also attract the attention of a wider audience.”
-- Justin Clemens Society & Space
"A keenly observed and elegantly written account . . . A sophisticated and nuanced ethnography."
-- Silvia Posocco Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute