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Thomä, Kächele, and their coworkers have very decisively contributed to giving the new German psychoanalysis a standing of high relevance in the ongoing psychoanalytic discourse—by their courageous insistence on far greater scientific accountability and with that of a much deepened epistemological examination of claims and premises of psychoanalytic practice and theory. When they presented this first volume of their synthesis of analytic experience and thought in its German version, it was immediately a dramatic success in Europe, and considered a most impressive reintegration of the insights of the first nine decades of psychoanalysis—the more important as it appeared at a time of a serious crisis in psychoanalysis, in the United States and increasingly also in Europe, especially with regard to its organizational, sociopolitical, and scientific credentials. A nonpolemical treatment of many of the problems underlying this crisis is overdue: "We discern within psychoanalysis many attempts at integration, or at least serious scientific endeavors to resolve differences of opinion more clearly than before" (p. xxv).
I shall try to present critically the three main points of this first volume that serve this goal.
"Our leitmotif is the conviction that the analyst's contribution to the