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A. Haynal, Controversies in Psychoanalytic Method. Translated by E. Holder. Preface by D. Stern. New York, New York University Press, 1989, 202 Pages.
CONCEIVABLY, THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS could now be recast and rewritten from the standpoint of the dialectical tension between the competing interests of the various interpretive metapsychologies and direct psychoanalytic inquiry. That new version of the history of psychoanalysis would move back and forth between the development of this field of human knowledge, seeking to coordinate the two, and the lives of individual psychoanalysts caught up in its dialectic of metapsychology and psychology, searching for their own true positions. Practicing psychoanalysts are, of course, free to choose, even forced to create, their favored balance of these competing interests in a uniquely personal amalgam, and the many-faceted character of psychoanalysis fully reflects this today. Yet, alongside the increasing recognition of he pluralistic point of view in interpretive metapsychology, it is also becoming increasingly clear to observers of psychoanalysis inside and outside the field that its future stands or falls as a therapeutic enterprise.
This dialectical tension between the interpretive generalities of metapsychology and the immediacies of direct psychoanalytic inquiry has certainly characterized the foundations of American psychoanalysis. Mainly, I believe, in discussions between the id-ego psychologists from intellectualized Vienna and the interpersonal relationists from pragmatic New York-Washington. Now taking