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Psychoanalysis as conceived by its founder, Sigmund Freud, was both a study of how the mind evolved and functioned and a therapy for those who suffered from some interference in comfortable and presumably healthy functioning. Freud began as a neurologist and only gradually found himself as a psychologist but one who understood and decoded what he called the unconscious rather than concerning himself with the consciously known mind of an adult. He eventually distanced himself from what would be called neuroscience and the structures of the brain that result in a functional mind. Freud's initial desire appears to have been a wish to become a biologist of the mind; his Project (1895), never published in his lifetime, outlined much about the brain's anatomy and how it generated mental content but clinical experience with patients moved him in another direction: to consider psychoanalysis an exclusively psychological endeavor that could map the unconscious as an entity in itself. Furthermore, the actual concern of all who chose to follow him as psychoanalysts in the exploration of minds in turmoil and conflict have followed Freud's inclination to see psychoanalysis as a study of the unconscious mind.
The field of psychoanalysis, however, hasn't remained unified, rather it has split, splintered and ever fragmented among those who continue to call themselves psychoanalysts despite their disparate investments in concepts and perspectives. To begin with the interest in metapsychology, so important to Freud, has been variably important to contemporary analysts, particularly when the clinical situation requires from the analyst something far more human and interactive than what the knowledge and use of what the metapsychology of the unconscious can provide. It is likely, however, that those psychoanalysts who have edited this book and those who have contributed chapters are much more interested in metapsychology and brain functioning than those who have pursued the therapeutic