You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalytic orientation to personality theory is in a state of transition. The convergence of a number of trends lends impetus to this development: the changing conception of the nature of mental illness and health; the quest for specificity in the application of psychotherapeutic methods to different pathological conditions; the expanding studies of ego dynamics, interper-personal communication, adaptation of individual to group and the development of role theory; also the collaboration of psychoanalysis and social science, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis and physiology on the other; the exploration of the relation of values to mental health; finally, the beginnings of a social psychopathology of family life, and the forging of new tools for the prevention of mental illness. In all of these trends, the core problem which demand solution is the integration of knowledge of the internal homeostatic mechanisms of personality with knowledge of the processes of adaptation to environment and accommodation to the requirements of a range of social roles.
Freud focused his primary interest on the relations between the biological essence of man's nature and his unconscious mental life. He put off dealing with the issues of adaptation to time, place and social conditions. Even now we are still trying to catch up with the conceptual complications of this one-sided orientation to personality.
From the time of Freud's early publications, now some sixty-odd years, the excitement of evaluating and reevaluating his libido theory has hardly abated. Even today the fire of this controversy continues to burn, though less fiercely than it did twenty years ago. The issues, cooler now, to be sure, are very much with us still.
Most of us would agree that the categorization of analysts, either as instinctual theorists or culturalists, is rather arbitrary. The urge to divide analysts into two broad, opposing classes is understandable but makes little sense. There is, I believe, some criti