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This is John Gedo's most recent of 17 books he has authored or edited over the past 30 years. It covers not only the story of his life but is apparently his final clinical summary, now that he has retired from practising psychoanalysis after four decades. He is an original thinker and tends to evoke and provoke those reductionists who hold to a rigid theoretical school of thought, as if their faction possesses a monopoly of psychoanalytic wisdom.
He sees psychoanalysis as a psychobiological science rather than a hermeneutic exercise, although he leaves the way open for further conceptual understandings in the future, as evidenced by the shifting theoretical positions he has held over his career. He now rather proudly calls himself a “school of one.” In his early years he was a self-psychology fellow traveller with Kohut and Goldberg, after holding more traditional views like his analyst Maxwell Gitelson. His political struggles with “St. Joan, the wicked witch” Fleming as a candidate, and later his intense ambivalent relationship and parting of the ways with Heinz Kohut and the whole self-psychology movement highlights the spleen more than the nostalgia—which is mostly reserved for his mother, Hungary, and the classical arts, rather than for his colleagues and psychoanalysis at present.
He espouses a schema for self-organization that leans heavily on a neurobiological deficit model, which includes mutative “instructional” novel interventions that are beyond interpretation and empathy. He believes that, for some, neither interpretation nor empathic interventions are sufficient to achieve structural change and that healing can take place in the absence of transference interpretations. Gedo calls these non-conflicted ego/social deficits “apraxias.” They present as an absence of normal values—adaptive functions or skills that haven't been or couldn't be learned. These patterns may persist into adulthood in the form of defective self-regulation, bodily symptoms, and cognit