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John Gedo's Beyond Interpretation aims at a "revised theory for psychoanalysis." It is built upon the foundation of Gedo and Goldberg's Models of the Mind, and presents the extension of Gedo's (although apparently not Goldberg's) thinking since the earlier work. Its goal is ambitious: "to demontrate that our current psychological insights, properly applied … give us unprecedented opportunities to assist our analysands to alter their subsequent functioning." Gedo's concept of psychoanalysis is that interpretation is only one of five coequal therapeutic methods, each appropriate for the problems characteristic of a specific mode of psychological functioning. The characteristic problems and appropriate therapies are overstimulation and pacification, disruption of self-cohesion and unification, persistence of illusion and optimal disillusionment, conflict and interpretation, and finally frustration and introspection. At one point, he even suggests the possibility of a sixth mode, beyond frustration, characterized by creation and poetry, but this is only a hint.
Gedo's psychoanalysis encompasses all of these therapies. Each will be necessary in every psychoanalysis, since each patient presents problems in all modes, and the treatment of issues related to later modes requires the prior resolution of issues stemming from earlier modes. However, in one passage, Gedo defines psychoanalysis as "the process of acquiring self-knowledge through reliving crucial childhood transactions within the treatment setting," suggesting that insight is at least primum inter pares.
Gedo's interest in the more primitive modes of psychological functioning, the patients in whom they are prominent (a large group of those he considers analyzable), and the therapeutic strategies that they elicit direct his attention to the crucial role of the first few years of life in psychic development. He argues that "only by altering the outcome of each of the earlier developmental vicissitudes" (i.e.,