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Opposition is True Friendship.
At any time psychoanalytic theory is like a family of ideas, with resemblances, relationships and feuds, and with new members expected to take their place alongside the rest and respect the authority of the ancestors, especially Freud. If a psychoanalytic approach is to survive,
Page 1388there must be ways of pruning this “family tree,” choosing between rival explanations so that the body of theory is strengthened rather than continuing to branch out [Fonagy and Target, p. 289].
This book by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target is a major text for psychoanalysis. But it is a “stealth” work: masquerading as a mild-mannered review of developmental research that bears on psychoanalytic theories, this book is not only a comprehensive contemporary synthesis of developmental theory and research in psychoanalysis, but also a full-scale presentation and critique of major ideas in the evolution of psychoanalytic theories of development and psychopathology. It is also, and most fascinatingly to my mind, an examination of psychoanalytic ways of theorizing and of some of their unintended consequences. It is at once systematic and incisive in its argument—a Fenichel for the twenty-first century, in disguise.
Like Fenichel's 1945 work, which was as close to a comprehensive synthesis of psychoanalytic theory of psychopathology as has ever been of fered, Fonagy and Target's book is a monument to scholarship and close reading. Psychoanalytic Theories: Perspectives from Developmental Psychopathology features a 75-page bibliography, which I would estimate contains over 1,500 references to works of analytic theorists and researchers (Fenichel's had a similar number of citations). The authors cited include North American and British theorists familiar to most American analysts, but psychoanalytic voyagers Fonagy and Target have journeyed not only between London and New York, but also between Scotland and Paris (though the visit is limited primarily to time sp