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I feel very grateful to Charles Brenner whose discussions, papers, and books began to supply me with so much (and so much-needed) clarity, logic, and intelligent understanding when I was a psychoanalytic candidate and beginning practitioner more than forty years ago. I was also fortunate to have the equally gifted, clear-thinking, and articulate man who is Brenner's friend and sometime coauthor, Jacob Arlow, as my first teacher of analytic theory.1
Arlow began his teaching of theory with a historical approach illustrated by current clinical examples, spelling out for the student the revolutionary import of what he described as Freud's “basic assumptions”: the existence of the unconscious functioning of the mind; psychic determinism; and the ubiquity of psychic conflict (in the form of a Hegelian dialectic—wish or drive versus defense with a resultant compromise). Brenner adds a fourth assumption, perhaps taken for granted by Arlow as a certainty for any psychologically minded individual: the existence of a sequence of development of the mind. We know there is a sequence of development, but its details, especially the how and when things develop, can be controversial.
Brenner's paper serves as a brief summary of much of his work; it has the admirable goal of trying to formulate what is valid in each