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Psychoanalysis has to base itself more fully in contemporary culture, if it is to continue exercising a determinant role in the field of psychological culture and in the practice of psychotherapy, regaining a credibility that is nowadays compromised.
In view of this aim we have to consider:
the inevitability of the epistemic reappraisal which started at the New York Convention of 1958. It is impossible nowadays to ignore the work of Nagel, Popper, Gruenbaum and Putnam, who have started to investigate the scientific knowledge of psychoanalysis, examining the internal consistency of the psychoanalytic model and the logical-empirical procedures of verification;
the necessity to adopt a transversal approach towards the various fields of knowledge. Such an approach allows us to connect the concepts and data of psychoanalysis with those of related sciences: cognitive psychology, experimental psychology, developmental psychology, neurosciences etc.
This comparative reflection aims at a renewal of metapsychology, not a rejection of it, introducing into it conceptual assumptions closer to contemporary sciences.
In keeping with these introductory ideas, it is difficult today to disregard the relational viewpoint in psychoanalysis, an approach which is closer to the concepts of complex systems (Stolorow, in press). In this sense the reading of classical myths is oriented by concepts of a relational nature, rather than drive-based concepts. The fight between Oedipus and his father takes place not in order to conquer the object-mother, but because of the perception—pursued with determination—of the father as killer of parts of one's own self.
According to this point of view, fantasy is not just a way in which the drive manifests itself. At a level of higher complexity and symbolisation, fantasy becomes a way in which the unconscious relational pattern manifests itself. This is the pattern which the individual uses to negotiate all his present and past relationships.
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