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I want to begin with a statement midway between an observation and a declaration: We are now in the relatively early phases of a momentous shift in psychological paradigm—a shift away not only from the classical psychoanalytic model of instinct and defense, but from the approach and perspective inherent in the word analysis itself.
The indications are everywhere around us: the deep uneasiness, bordering on despair, of large numbers of practitioners and investigators as they experience threats to the validity of the existing classical paradigm along with an absence of a new paradigm sufficiently powerful to replace it; the widely felt, though often inchoate sense, that we are losing rather than gaining ground in our struggles to cope professionally with the increasingly formidable social and psychological forces that confront us; and the atmosphere of chaotic eclecticism, within which it becomes difficult indeed to distinguish narrow dogma and intensified cultism from sustained commitment, superficiality from bold experiment, and excessive claim from genuine accomplishment.
In all this the psychological professions are hardly alone. Other disciplines, probably without exception, suffer similarly, sharing with us as they do the confusions and possibilities that accompany the vast contemporary breakdown of viable cultural symbolizations and forms that I have elsewhere spoken of as “psychohistorical dislocation.” But there is special poignancy and pain in our particular situation of being both caught up in this dislocation and