You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Charles Brenner has surely been one of the principal architects in the unfolding development of the ego psychology metapsychological paradigm inaugurated by Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein in mid-twentieth-century America. He has centrally guided the development of its structural theory toward its current articulation as conflict theory and compromise formation (Arlow and Brenner, 1964; Brenner, 1976, 1982), and his earlier textbook (Brenner, 1955) stood for long as the foremost teaching exposition of the then monolithically regnant (in America) ego psychological theory. And he is still profoundly influential in the shaping of whatever consensus is emerging (or will emerge) on what constitutes “mainstream” American psychoanalysis at the turn of a new century.
Given this position within our current, somewhat beleaguered psychoanalytic “mainstream,” Brenner's presentation of his “Reflections on Psychoanalysis” indeed warrants our careful attention. Certainly, much of what Brenner states resonates strongly with the predilections and perspectives of those of us brought up psychoanalytically within the same hegemonic ego psychology which so dominated American psychoanalysis during the immediate post-World War II decades. At the same time, I find him disappointingly dismissing or ignoring major formative trends that are reshaping the overall corpus of psychoanalysis in America over the most recent decades—including in the work of many of those similarly “classically”