Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. By Cynthia Burack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 224p. $42.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Are groups necessarily destructive? This question is the focus of Cynthia Burack's new book. To address it, she constructs a conversation among psychoanalytic political theorists, psychoanalytic group theorists, and black feminist theorists. As the structure of the book makes clear, Burack hopes to broaden her audience to readers unfamiliar with any or all of these discourses. She intends to convince students of politics and feminists (particularly black feminists) that psychoanalytic theory can contribute much to understanding the dynamics of that ubiquitous feature of political life, groups. Furthermore, she wants to bridge the disciplinary gap between those who study groups and those who engage in discourse analysis. Discourse analysts are presently primarily located in humanities and cultural studies, and when they employ psychoanalytic thinking, it tends to be the Lacanian strand. Burack argues for a different tack, psychoanalytic object relations theory, particularly as articulated by Wilfred Bion, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein.