Fred Pine's Drive, Ego, Object, and Self is an elegant and courageous book which is likely to rekindle longstanding controversy over pluralistic and unitary models of explanation in psychoanalytic theory. Pine's hypothesis is that contemporary psychoanalytic practice is in fact based on four distinct theoretical models, each with considerable descriptive and explanatory power and each referring to its own particular constellation of experiential, clinical and developmental phenomena.

These four 'psychologies of psychoanalysis'—drive psychology which is central to classical psychoanalysis, ego psychology, object-relations theory and the psychology of the self (but not specifically Kohut's version)—have become the main tools of psychoanalytic theory and practice, Pine argues, because they refer to domains of clinical phenomena which are relatively distinct, though intertwined and overlapping, and are central to the lives of our patients. Pine writes