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L. Chertok and R. de Saussure, The Therapeutic Revolution: From Mesmer to Freud. Translated by R. Ahrenfeldt. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1979. 226 pages.
IT IS A SIGN OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUSLY evolving present of psychoanalysis that its serious researchers are, with increasing frequency, once again turning to a review and reconstruction of its history. In view of the current efforts to observe and define, explain and interpret such dimensions of therapeutic inquiry as the psychology of the self and the immediate psychic experience of first-personal processes, and their variants, it is, in fact, even becoming necessary to look back at that history, and to rework it from the standpoint of the new post-modern perspective.
This new therapeutic inquiry is, of course, emerging against the backdrop of the established, modern, post-Freudian perspectives. It goes directly to the dynamics of the immediate, first-personal experience of the uniquely individual self relating to the mediate, social and cultural behavior of the ego-interpersonal (or object-relational) other. It, therefore, points up the dynamic aspects of the historical development of psychoanalytic inquiry that, during the 1930s, imperceptibly faded into the shadows of that earlier post-Freudian work, as epitomized in such various modern perspectives as character analysis, ego psychology, interpersonal, and object relations.
Those 1930s approaches are, as a group, all part of the outward movement of psychoanalytic thought into the environing conditions of the patient's life. They revolve about the adaptive or consensual distribution of the individual's life experience as social