Paul Mosher Replies

September 9, 1998. Mark Leffert has raised two issues that are both interesting and significant, and I thank him for doing so.

The first is whether it was reasonable for me to use the word evolution to describe changes in psychoanalytic thought, as reflected in the journal literature, over the seven decades in question. If such an evolutionary process actually does exist, then a subsequent question would be whether the simple technique described in my brief note, based on the computation of the relative frequency of particular words in the literature over these decades, illustrates such a process.

I'm not the first person to suggest that the journal literature in psychoanalysis has followed an evolutionary course. Several authors, including a former editor of this journal, have described psychoanalytic thought as “evolving,” with the implication that our ideas have developed in an orderly way (Abend and Porder 1986; Blum 1987, 1989; Pines 1985). In fact, Blum (1973) once wrote that “the Journal represents and perpetuates our analytic activities and aspirations; it records and influences the evolution of psychoanalytic thought.” The term evolution is used quite a few times in the journal literature itself to describe change over time in psychoanalytic “thought,” “thinking,” “ideas,” and “theory,” as a simple search of the CD-ROM will reveal. Leffert himself concedes the validity of this concept (if not my invocation of it in the present instance) in the very passage in which he disagrees with me.

The second issue raised by Leffert is whether the particular approach I illustrated is in fact capable of showing the evolution of ideas in the published literature. With so little work having been done in this area, the answer to this question is still simply a matter of opinion. However, I believe that the word frequency approach I described can plausibly be said to point to such a process because of the orderly changes in rates that appear to occur over this long seq