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For an eager reader of many papers and books that promise to present a new view on old issues, this text by Morris Eagle stands out for many good reasons. Just by taking a look at the back cover, one finds impressive statements: In Joseph Schachter's words the book “demonstrates a unique talent for presenting a remarkably lucid, largely jargon free, comprehensive, sympathetic delineation of Freud's oeuvre in approximately 100 pages—a stunning tour-de-force!”; Peter Fonagy calls it “a masterpiece of conceptual integration, … the best guide to the development of modern psychoanalytic thinking” and Paul Wachtel writes that the “book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand deeply the ferment within psychoanalysis and the theoretical options that reside within its borders”.
The first two parts of the book are organized around fundamental topics of Freudian classical theory and contemporary psychoanalytic theories: (1) Conceptions of mind, (2) Conceptions of object relations, (3) Conception of psychopathology and (4) Conceptions of treatment. The first part of the book spells out how Freudian theory addresses these topics; the second part then critically examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theories address them.
I have to admit that studying the third part on “Divergences and Convergences” allowed me to fully appreciate the richness of the exposition of the Freudian work in Part I and its further development in the various schools of thought in Part II. I shall focus on some illuminating discussions in Part III to provide the reader with a sense of the richness of the text.
The vision of enlightenment that Eagle attributes to the classical position clearly is a favorite topic of his evaluation. There he identifies a strong cultural pattern that lets him speak of a mini-paradigm shift:
I would suggest that the contemporary psychoanalytic attitude toward uncovering truth and the privileging of the therapeutic relationship … is not simply attributable to cl