The Future of Psychoanalysis by Richard D. Chessick,  State University of New York Press, New York, 2007, pp.  265.

Richard D. Chessick's new book is so multi-varied and comprehensive that a review will not do it justice. The present writing will hopefully serve to introduce the interested reader in its contents.

Chessick's perspective and purpose in writing “The Future of Psychoanalysis” is a focus for psychoanalysts to return to Freud - “…. the Freud of the entire Standard Edition, the record of a lifetime of Freud's evolving thought that formed the centerpiece of the training and thinking of psychoanalysts of my generation.” In doing so, the author utilizes a variety of philosophical conceptions and related psychoanalytic concepts. First and foremost, but by no means exclusive, are the ideas of Hegel and his conviction of an inevitable unfolding of consciousness and individual self awareness akin to Freud's contribution of neutrality in allowing the subject matter to unfold with its own inevitable momentum. Hegel's approach, as with Freud's, allows ordinary consciousness to direct itself through several stages resulting in the ultimate resolution of contradiction and vindicating itself as a clinical science. In this regard, the author draws in material from multiple sources. Chessick is in a unique position to discuss the various philosophical perspectives cogent to psychoanalytic work and, for example, notes that the philosopher Paul Ricoeur pointed out that psychoanalysis combines both hermeneutics and empirical study. To Ricoeur's ideas the author emphasizes the crucial phenomena of the transference describing this as the link with Freudian conceptions of natural science. He writes: “The methodological incorporation of hermeneutics and energetics was Freud's crucial epistemological discovery …anew form of investigation.” He also points out that the transference far from being shaped in the present is a revival of unconscious infantile conflicts and traumatic experiences associated with precognitive memories, “which have been worked over during infancy into archaic core fanta