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The Freudian Metaphor raises critical issues in the epistemology of psychoanalysis which go beyond clarification or elaboration of basic principles, and also reflect fundamental divisions within the field and among its practitioners. Although Spence focuses exclusively on the epistemological consequences and implications for the discipline, I believe that the role of psychoanalytic education and the concept of the field in the minds of its primary carriers of knowledge—clinical psychoanalysts—is also very much at issue.
Jerome Brunner's Foreword provides an excellent summary introduction to the major point which Spence spends the book elaborating: that "objectivity" in psychoanalysis is not possible, or even a meaningful technical goal, because "… we have come to appreciate the degree to which psychological processes are bound by the contexts in which they occur" (p. xv). This fundamental relativism lies in direct contrast to the powerfully held view that somehow psychoanalysis can be made more scientific, that if only we can cook the soft subjectivities out of our theory and method, we can achieve a disciplinary status not unlike that of chemistry or physics. Bruner boldly and correctly confronts this view: "To deny the difficulties of interpretation by making claims to a scientific status is to weaken the central claims of psychoanalysis as a human science. In a deep sense, the difficulties of contemporary psychoanalysis inhere precisely in its claim to being a 'science' in the positivistic sense of the term and by avoiding the thorny issues of interpretation and hermeneutics" (p. xv, italics added).