This is a work of philosophical analysis that applies trenchant criticism to the philosophical bases of traditional Freudian theory, including not only Freud's early instinct theory, but the later developments of ego psychology as represented in the work of H. Hartmann, D. Rapaport and R. W. White. The criticism is thoughtful and forceful, clearly argued and articulated, and provides a powerful and fundamental reassessment of some basic psychoanalytic conceptions. While the author's thesis is clearly and forcefully argued, psychoanalytic readers will find it heavy going, and both challenging and thought-provoking. This is not a book to be read casually or offhandedly.

The argument goes something like this: psychoanalytic theory in many of its variants rests on an underlying supposition of a Cartesian view according to which the world is divided into two mutually exclusive