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In this book the author addresses a timely and important task—the synthesis of the recent findings of infant research with psychoanalytic theory. He begins with the statement “Psychoanalytic theory at its core is a theory of structured motivation, not a theory of structure.” This, upon reflection, is a point well made. Historically, the main thing that has attracted the interest of clinicians and the public at large in psychoanalysis is the notion that psychoanalysis explains why people do what they do.
Lichtenberg reminds us that the psychoanalytic theory of motivation had its origins with Freud's theory of instinctual drives. But at this point in time, almost a hundred years after Freud's major contribution, our theory of motivation, the author observes, is in acute disarray. Over the years psychoanalysts have felt compelled to postulate sources of motivation that compete with or even replace Eros and Thanatos. Even Freud recognized the traumatic experience (in which the ego learns to react with anxiety to similar experiences in the future) as a source of motivation.
The possibility of other sources of motivation, such as “autonomous ego functions,” “the organizing potential of object relations,” or “the dominant mass of ideas,” has encouraged fragmentation of the field into rival schools of thought identified chiefly by the source (or sources) of motivation their adherents view as central to their understanding of human dynamics. Thus we have drive-theory analysts vs. object relations analysts, existential analysts vs. Freudian analysts, classical analysts vs. modern analysts, and so on.
The relatively new work on detailed observations of infant behavior as well as research on the nature and function of emotions offers