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Like salvoes across the bow, the opening sentences of this book put us on notice: By privileging insight over symptom relief, ‘psychoanalysts [have] not only made themselves irrelevant to most peoples’ needs, but, as many critics have pointed out, also compromised clinical psychoanalysis as a scientific investigative tool’ (p. 2). Fighting words! This candid, polemical voice is familiar to us. It is the in-your-face-and-won't-go-away provocation that Owen Renik regularly puts to organized American psychoanalysis. The first chapter—and the book that follows—is really then a psychoanalytic manifesto, a call to arms. And, as a statement of belief and position, the details are working themselves out, moving in a trajectory whose arc we can discern. This then is a work still in progress—and it must be, because it reflects a whole field still in progress. This snapped into place for me as a discussant of a talk Renik gave a few years back when he asserted:
For me, the Hegelian concept of [a] progressive dialectical process is … [most] relevant to psychoanalysis: instead of being in an eternal, complementary relationship to one another, contradictory propositions contend with one another until one of them prevails or until their contradiction becomes obsolete in [the] light of a new integration—the well-known juxtaposition of thesis to antithesis, leading to [an] eventual synthesis.