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Leo Rangell, one of our most eminent psychoanalysts, has made outstanding contributions to our literature with more than 450 papers and six books. He has also been the President of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association. He is now 93, and, in this his newest volume, he achieves a bravura performance of synthesis and integration, tracing the history of the major controversies that have beset psychoanalysis since its inception.
Rangell is convinced that psychoanalysis is a science and he is worried about the erosive effect of a facile pluralism on psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise. His proposed solution, captured in the title of this volume, is to travel the road to unity. He draws heavily on his past publications, advocating what he has called total composite theory to illustrate his alternative to this pluralism and urges us to follow him. At the very outset he tells us candidly that he speaks of psychoanalytic theory, not theories. “In my view, there is a theory of psychoanalysis, and many nonpsychoanalytic theories” (p. 8).
He discusses his views about the causes of this problem. Pluralism in his view has been all too welcome among us; it has been wrongly celebrated and it is time to correct this trend. He gives several reasons for the ascendance of this tendentious development. The first is the fallacy in our history of replacing rather than adding. He views much of our literature as a record of theoretic promiscuity with new facts used to wipe out older ones instead of assessing both with objective criteria. He gives convincing support to his view of the destructive role of the pars pro toto fallacy in a number of theoretic ruptures.
I was especially appreciative of his useful discussion throughout the book of the trend in our literature to either–or arguments, in which a fallacious dichotomy is assumed to force us to choose between two choices that are by no means mutually exclusive. One of the great virtue