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Brenner's latest book, The Mind in Conflict, reflects a decline amongst traditionalists in the search for a psychosomatic understanding of mental phenomena. Freud's mind-body concepts are dismissed on the grounds that they would carry the analyst into non-analytic territory. Brenner supposes the consideration of hormonal or other somatic sources or physiologic correlates of psychic activity to be a betrayal of psychoanalysis.
Doubtless, this is the reason why this reviewer was disappointed in the expectation that this book would contain an analysis of the role of drives in mental functioning. Instead, drives are described simply as “the well-springs of human motivation … as obscure today as they were in 1933.” It is the weakness of this text that with the wealth of clinical data available to him, Brenner concludes that we cannot be sure of a dual drive theory. He says:
We cannot say whether aggression and libido are separate at the start of psychic development and gradually mix or fuse in the course of it, or whether the two differentiate gradually from a common matrix.
In place of an exploration of relation between drives, psychic structure and conflict, Brenner reiterates his theory of affects which he developed in 1974, in which he stresses his distinction between anxiety as a fear of future danger and depression as a fear of calamity that has already occurred. Brenner details the relations between defense, the calamities of childhood, and affects explained along these two continua, as functions of the intensity of unpleasure. In his discussion of defense, Brenner attributes to Freud recognition of the connection between defense and drive, but he fails to credit Freud with recognition of the use of defense