Description
Outside analytic circles one often hears it said that psychoanalysis is only concerned with the individual. The work of Menzies Lyth is a powerful answer to that claim. Continuing the themes of Containing Anxiety in Institutions, she reflects here on a variety of social situations: the dynamics of the Fire Brigade, conflicts between psychiatric hospitals and the communities that they serve and family patterns of consumption. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging survey of the psychological aftermath of disaster, which makes new links between a Kleinian model of the earliest mental states and both the immediate and longer-term needs of disaster survivors – be it an earthquake or a plane crash. The work is a reminder of the need for a sophisticated psychoanalytic perspective on the social. Its publication confirms that Isabel Menzies Lyth’s writings constitute the most important body of psychoanalytic work on the social bearings of the psyche.
