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.
In gathering the essays contained in this special issue, I have pondered the connection of these samplings to the writings of Sigmund Freud. On the one hand, these papers represent my best efforts to relate my work with patients and my ideas about lives and religion to what Freud produced. Even though I have always had Freud in my mind, the connection between my writing and his theories may not be at all manifest. Perhaps I have been struggling under some kind of illusion of relatedness when very little or none exists. On the other hand, the problem may lie in the nature of theories, their development, and their destiny. Every theory of mind has its own lifetime. Freud created psychoanalysis in order to treat patients who were victims of the outworn morals and values of late-nineteenth-century Vienna. His idea of the unconscious loosened the stringencies and aberrations of a shop-girl-oriented sexuality and a nobility-rewarding culture. Freud's theories were exported to the United States where they have undergone a rather startling reformulation. At first, his theory of psychoanalytic treatment became part of the medical establishment. Later, Freud's ideas spread to American culture via education, literature, art, and entertainment. This dissemination of Freud's original formulations has resulted in a bewildering variety of concepts of cognition, emotion, psychopathology, and treatment.
Today it is no longer possible to disentangle Freud's original ideas from the morass of analytic theories in which they may or not be embedded. Perhaps, in a way, it is time for Freud's theories to die so that they can become part of a reinvigorating rebirth.