Editors' Introduction

Psychoanalysis is a group intellectual activity and so is as vulnerable to fads and fashions as any other group. Indeed it sometimes seems as if psychoanalysis, situated as it is between the arts and sciences, is afflicted not only by its own fads, but by every intellectual fad that comes along. For that reason it is helpful to reflect now and then on developments in our field, in an effort to distinguish genuine progress from faddish novelty.

Fortunately psychoanalysis has never lacked for internal critics willing to take on this necessary though usually lonely and unpopular task. Edward Glover was one such psychoanalyst. Those of us who in the 1960s were students struggling to comprehend the ultrafashionable but endlessly proliferating abstract metapsychologies of the times, can still remember the relief provided by one of Glover's ringing pronouncements: “Not to mince words, I should have said that a large—much too large—proportion of modern psychoanalytic theory runs little short of sophistry and that such psychoanalytic students as must abide this instruction are willy-nilly forced to qualify for the status of sophisters” (Glover, 1966, p. 174).

Glover was particularly severe about the now modestly useful but then hugely popular concepts of “identity” and “identity formation.” “These concepts have in recent years become one of the fads in psychoanalytic circles, indeed have gained currency in nonanalytic, eclectic, psychiatric, and social-psychiatric groups, which is very often an indication of the superficiality of a new concept” (p. 184). He felt that “identity” and “identity formation” were examples of the catch phrases “that from time to time sweep like wildfire across the sometimes parched fields of modern psychoanalytic thinking” (p. 184).

Glover felt that the various self and identity concepts could be described “in simpler and more dependable terms,” which could then be subject to basic clinical research. Glover intended “once again to call attention to th