You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Why did Freud have to wage war on Adler? Why couldn't they see they were both right and wrong and that the best scientific values develop historically from the outcome of such controversies? Have we truly appreciated the relevance of this approach to controversy to the current imperative to integrate new theories of self psychology into our day to day work? Are there really two brains (hemispheres) similarly trying to work together and at times waging war on each other? Can each do its work partially or completely ignoring the other? Are analysts also with two minds not as capable as their patients of serious splits or disavowals? I have rarely encountered an Annual with as much to say on these issues or any anthology so hard to put down because of its immediate theoretical and heuristic value. I take as a serious assignment the validation of such an opinion. Of course, it follows that of all the fascinating chapters in the cornucopia of this recent issue of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, to me the most outstanding were the three addressing issues very close to my own concerns, the survival of man and the survival of psychoanalysis.
The first is an unusually sophisticated discussion by Stepansky on the little appreciated (at least by this reviewer) Freud-Adler-Kohut continuum. Set in context of 'Perspectives on dissent and the idea of a psychoanalytic research tradition', the author avoids any verdict on the psychoanalytic status of Kohut's self psychology, 'A domain adequately defined … as that aspect of reality that is accessible via introspection and empathy'. While illuminating the Kohutian methodology ('Empathy as a data gathering operation … to be scrupulously differentiated from the clinical results to which the data gathering leads'), he neatly questions, 'The adequacy of Kohut's definition of the psychoanalytic research tradition within which his self-psychological theories are to be situated'. After noting how self psychology incorpora