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These days psychoanalysis, in spite of enjoying apparent good health due to the large volume of studies and researches being produced, is also afflicted by the serious epis-temological problem of lacking a corpus of basic assumptions. It is well known that any term or concept in the psychoanalytic vocabulary doesn't have the same meaning for psychoanalysts of different persuasions. Behind terms and concepts, there are different ways of conceiving mental functioning and the psychoanalytic process.
Nonetheless, psychoanalytic knowledge does evolve. However, it does not develop around a core of shared knowledge; instead, separate islands proliferate and grow larger—unfortunately, only occasionally do the islands join up with one another. So, whoever wanted to survey the wide assortment of new ideas circulating in the psychoanalytic community by means of a collection of writings would be in a tight spot. First of all, such an editor would select papers that were as broadly representative as possible, trying to reduce bias to a minimum. Moreover, to avoid turning a collection of writings into a potpourri in which the reader gets lost, the editor usually groups texts into specific subject area sections. This is not an easy task either, since any criterion one chooses to employ—e.g. model or school, topic (clinical, theoretical, empirical, historical, conceptual research, methodology, applied psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary studies, and so on)—would turn out to be unsatisfying, as many articles deal with a variety of subjects and hence could be put simultaneously in different sections.
Arnold Cooper, an eminent psychoanalyst whose writings bear the imprint of American pragmatism, has assembled a collection that avoids these difficulties. He did not attempt to choose himself the most representative contemporary papers, but devolved the task to 30 renowned American psychoanalysts by asking them to recommend contributions they thought best represented their own current thinki