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Loewald's Freud lectures at Yale in 1978, which comprise this book, were presented to an interdisciplinary audience as "tentative philosophical reflections on psychoanalysis." The three essays present his views on man as a moral agent, transference and love, and religious experience. He hopes to demonstrate how psychoanalysis, "a rather untidy discipline," can explicate and raise valuable questions about these areas of psychological functioning.
To fully appreciate the richness of Loewald's contribution, the analyst needs to fill out the background of these lectures which were designed for a sophisticated but lay audience. Since familiarity with his previous, more technical, writings will be helpful, I shall refer to them as I progress.
To a large extent this is a philosophical treatise. As with Freud's death instinct (with which Loewald [1972] agrees with some modification, and which, like Freud, he uses to partially explain the negative therapeutic reaction), its relation to clinical observation is not immediate and should not be judged on the basis of clinical observation. The concepts he discusses are akin to that level of Waelder's (1962) hierarchy of psychoanalytic knowledge which is furthest removed from clinical data. It is important to recognize,as with Freud's philosophical ideas, fine clinical work can be done without accepting them.
In his first lecture, "Man as a Moral Agent," Loewald requires the healthy person to be able to maintain some access to his dynamic unconscious and infantile self (including its affects, its experiences in relating to early objects, etc.). This to-and-fro movement within the psychic apparatus is considered not only enriching, but necessary for unrestricted functioning; each individual must learn about his past and accept it as a part of his current self-representation.
Loewald insists it is a moral requirement that the individual integrate his id into his conscious life. The theme of morality being the integration and awa