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KURT GOLDSTEIN'S CONTRIBUTION to the development of psychology and psychoanalysis has been considerable. Fromm-Reichmann, for example, dedicates Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy to her "4 teachers": Sigmund Freud, Kurt Goldstein, Georg Groddeck
& Harry Stack Sullivan, and certainly anyone schooled and practicing in the tradition of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis continually encounters derivatives of and resonances with Goldstein's ideas. These short excerpts from The Organism give ample evidence of the richness and subtlety of Goldstein's thought.
What distinguishes the great minds in the history of ideas is not only their impact on subsequent thought, but the manner in which their work serves as a continual, never depleted resource for subsequent generations in their struggles with the issues and problems of their own day. The oeuvre of Freud and Sullivan enrich us in this fashion, and these selections from Goldstein might serve us similarly, if on a lesser scale. I would like to use this brief discussion to explore the light shed by Goldstein's reflections, nearly 50 years ago, on certain key problems facing contemporary psychoanalytic theoreticians.
Clinical psychoanalysis was developed within a larger vision of human nature. Freud's drive theory was a powerful and elegant framework within which were understood every domain of human experience: motivation, the structuralization of mind, child development, and so on. Drive theory was made more compelling because drive theory itself derived from, and was wholely in the spirit of, Darwinism, that sweeping redefinition of human origins which informed and inspired every major intellectual discipline in the second half of the 19th century. We have not been created in the image of a God, but rather have evolved from "