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Morris Eagle has devoted a lifetime to the literature on psychoanalysis and psychology and the links between the two. His latest book is a passionate argument for an integrated and unified theory of mind, based on an expanded foundation in ego psychology. In the tradition of Hartmann and Rappaport, Eagle holds that psychoanalytic theory must be consistent with findings from other disciplines to communicate with them. Ego psychology, he argues, is the logical bridge to other approaches to the mind, notably to research in cognitive psychology and the neurosciences.
But his goal is more ambitious. The final chapter of his book begins: “A basic assumption motivating this book is that the project of seeking integration of different psychoanalytic schools and developing a relatively unified psychoanalytic theory of the mind is both possible and desirable” (273). The goal is important, but what is the best method for achieving it? Eagle’s method is to examine every school, including the origins and current practice of ego psychology, with a highly critical eye. But eventually we have to ask, who is his audience and who will accept this unified theory?
Eagle largely ignores previous approaches to integration; Rangell, for example, crusaded for years for a “total composite psychoanalytic theory”, and, currently, Solms bridges neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Both would seem pertinent to his project. He is sharply critical of those who argue for a theoretical “common ground” either of transference (Wallerstein 1990) or of countertransference (Gabbard 1995), and he gives no consideration to Sandler’s distinction between public and private theories and the “elasticity” of psychoanalytic terms that allow contradictory “partial theories” to “coexist happily” in the mind of the clinician as long as they remain descriptively unconscious (Sandler 1983, 36–8). Such partial clinical integrations, I suggest, are not only possible but also desirable and even inevitable as long as we do no