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With a sense of history and imagination, one might well appreciate John Frosch's short statement in his Acknowledgments of the ‘many difficulties which have delayed appearance of this volume’.
The year 1959 probably represents a critical era in the development of psychoanalytic thought and no doubt a time fraught with conflict and depression. Ego psychology was gaining momentum and the threat to Freud's original libido theory was becoming more and more apparent.
Ego psychology was still burdened with many aspects of instinct theory and instinct theorists were trying to fit adaptive concepts into its own structure. The result, as illustrated by many of the papers in this volume, was a confusion of concepts, terminology and convoluted thinking.
Very little of object-relation theory as outlined by Fairbairn and developed by British psychoanalysts gets much support in this volume. Instead, one finds many authors turning somersaults to subsume object-relation theory into pleasure-principle concepts. Indeed, very few British papers appear in this volume and especially missing are Winnicott's papers on transitional phenomena.
As is well-known, Freud in fact developed two theories—instinct theory and the Oedipus complex of family relationships. The former was a structuralist theory relying on energic concepts and the latter the precursor of ego-object relations theory. Freud's attempts to reconcile the two theories by retaining the instinctual frame and at the same time repudiating the primacy of the instincts led him and many of his followers to the creation of ingenious out tautological assumptions, which provided no new knowledge.
This survey of psychoanalytical writings in 1959 well illustrated the mainstream of classical thinking in attempts to reconcile the two opposing frames of reference—the instinctual versus the adaptational—by recourse to new energic propositions seen in the work of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein.
Without elaborating them here, there are several hypoth