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Herbert Strean sets out to provide a book to explain to psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists how to incorporate an understanding of unconscious processes into their work. He claims to offer ‘a clear introductory summary’ of psychoanalysis. Unfortunately, his summaries have the compressed clarity only of lecture notes. He makes little attempt to explain or persuade. For example, I cannot imagine a social worker being able to make any use of his one sentence descriptions of condensation, displacement and symbolization in primary process thinking. He does not relate such ideas to practice in a digestible way. Patrick Casement's discussion of unconscious symmetry in primary process thinking (in On Learning from the Patient) brings the topic to life in a way that this book does not. Whilst reading it, I had a recurring image of Herbert Strean looking through his lecture notes and speaking into a dictating machine. His tone is complacent and overfamiliar, yet curiously lacking in any intellectual context.
This lack of context is evident also in his failure to make clear that he is writing as an orthodox Freudian. For him, psychoanalysis is about discharging instinctual wishes and dealing with intrapsychic conflict; wishes are sexual wishes, anxiety is suppressed sexual excitement, and hysteria is the result of incestuous oedipal wishes. This approach is given as the ‘norm’, whilst later thinkers are presented as optional extras to be added on.
He makes no attempt to integrate other theories nor to discuss their merits. The ‘major concepts’ of Jung, Adler, Rank, Homey, Sullivan, Reich, Hartmann, Anna Freud, Erikson, Klein, Winnicott and Kohut are summarized in a few lines each. This whirlwind tour of psychoanalytic writing does not enable the reader to think. It seems to work more as a sort of Who's Who in psychoanalysis, enabling the reader to claim to have at least ‘heard of’ so and so.
The section on Klein is particularly weak. He claims that Klein thought that