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PSYCHOANALYSIS HAS PRODUCED FEW gadflies. This is strange in a discipline dedicated to challenging sacred cows. From Freud's debunking man's faith in the rule of reason to every clinician's stock in trade—"Have you looked at it this way?"—analysts have operated as the friendly critics of conventional wisdom. And yet not many writers have had the theoretical breadth, the clinical sensitivity, and the sympathy for analytic goals to raise similar questions about our own fundamental assumptions.
Where would a psychoanalytic gadfly begin? With Freud, certainly, especially with his vision of the discipline as he created it. Freud described the evolution of psychoanalytic theory succinctly in a passage from the New Introductory Lectures describing the development of psychoanalysis from its clinical origins to the elaboration of its theoretical structure. "The path, " he wrote, "led from symptoms to the unconscious, to the life of the instincts, to sexuality …" (1933, p. 57).
The first step on Freud's path, from symptoms—today, of course, we would add all those characteristics that constitute and define the individual personality—to the unconscious, is one that is accepted by all analysts. It has become what Freud might have called a "shibboleth" of modern psychoanalysis. The very concept of a therapeutically beneficial psychoanalytic inquiry, which assumes that one can effect change by broadening the patient's awareness of his experience, would make no sense without an underlying conviction that aspects of experience are kept from consciousness under ordinary circumstances.
The second step—somewhat more controversial—led Freud from the dynamic unconscious to instinct, or drive. In specifying