Discussion

Charles Brenner is a friend and revered teacher, educator to mental health professionals, and expositor of psychoanalytic theory. He also has been a skeptic to new theoretical provocateurs. Nonetheless, he has contributed his fair share of theoretical revisions. This most recent recommendation for theoretic revision puts me, as commentator, in an odd position, where I will play conservative ego psychologist to Dr. Brenner's youthful new wave minimalist model. I will address three areas: (1) Dr. Brenner's position in the history of psychoanalytic ideas; (2) the logic of clinical theory and his revision; and (3) some developmental propositions that psychoanalytic theory must consider, even if they are not directly related to our daily practice.

From the standpoint of the history of ideas there is a constant trend toward entropy and simplification. We peel away Victorian tapestries and heavy velvets in favor of minimalist propositions to account for clinical behaviors. We also try to move from Freudian authority to empirical justification, and yet our methods of verification are not yet cultivated enough to decide between theories. To wit, the current trend to case presentation and debate about meaning has led to endless discussions between self psychologists, object relationists, ego psychologists, and preoedipalist and oedipal determinists leading only to a Scottish verdict (not proven).

There are many things in Dr. Brenner's paper that remind us of early Freud. He uses drive theory: Dr. Brenner's drive theory (though dual) is similar to that espoused by Freud in 1905, during the period of the topographic theory when he saw defense as a response to moral, social values, and conscience and shame as causing the censor