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To those familiar with the enormous body of work that is Leo Rangell's contribution to the psychoanalytic core, The Road to Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory will sound many a familiar chord. To those less well acquainted, this slim volume will provide a most accessible introduction to one of the major players on the psychoanalytic stage for well-nigh half its history. Beyond that, the book offers not only an analysis, but in fact a psychoanalysis, of the dynamic forces and family tensions that have shaped the theoretical discourse and divides since Freud attracted his earliest followers.
Rangell's dedication page for this treatise reads “The trunk of the psychoanalytic tree is the Freudian theory of the mind.” His intention is to sound an alarm that has reverberated through his writings for the past three decades concerning the ever advancing blight of theoretical pluralism infecting the once sturdy trunk. As he views matters, this now rampant pluralism has led the discipline of psychoanalysis to its present state of “disillusionment and demoralization. … conflict, confusion, contradictions and a fragmented whole” (p. 4). His current assessment seems a good deal more dire and his plea more desperate, lacking the optimism of his 1974 presidential address to the International Psychoanalytical Association, in which he stated that despite the storms of dissension, “over the rubble, psychoanalysis still stands, like a colossus, ravaged and gouged but always there, to the relief even of those who attack it” (p. 7).
In describing the disease infecting psychoanalysis and undermining its claim to scientific credibility, Rangell is also setting the stage for a reiteration of his solution to the crisis, which he first presented in his 1988 article “The Future of Psychoanalysis: The Scientific Crossroads.” Then and now he proposes a total composite theory “developed by accretion,