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This book describes how Freud was influenced in the development of his theories by the cultural and scientific milieu of his time. The author's main thesis is that although Freud was partially able to transcend these scientific and cultural values, many of his theories are conservative and rooted in the biases of his period. The "unfinished journey" could be pursued if we seek out, examine, and remove biases that have limited the development of a universal psychoanalytic theory.
We begin with an exploration of Freud's background as a scientist. The author feels that this has influenced him too much in the direction of a physicalist-materialist approach, with reason and objectivity being overvalued. The result is a metapsychology that is too mechanistic, limited by the ideals of nineteenth-century physics.
In Chapter 3, "Psychoanalysis Is Not a Science," the author would follow George Klein and Roy Schafer in an attempt to remove the superstructure of metapsychology and to tie psychoanalytic principles directly to clinical theory. He contrasts "older" scientific models with "modern" ones. Praise is given to some of the new models, but the emergence of a new false scientism is associated with others. Special praise is given to John Bowlby (p. 42) who the author feels is able to dispel the mechanistic conception of the oral drive and the pleasure principle and modify them with data from ethology, information and systems theories, and direct observations of mothers and infants. Bowlby thereby develops the more humanistic and adaptive concept of attachment behavior. G. Bateson is also praised for using information and systems theory to illuminate the bizarre family communication patterns in schizophrenics, changing the conception of mental illness from an internal process to an interactive one. Any theory that attempts to objectify and dehumanize the individual too much is not to be trusted. Hence the author prefers to consider that psychoanalysis is not a scien