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Gregory Zilboorg believes that psychoanalysis is going through a critical period as a result of the interplay of many definite dynamic forces. He points out that the world crisis brought economic, racial, sociological, political and military issues to the forefront and placed the psychoanalysts in the position of having to become practical sociologists, philosophers, and ethnologists, all of which they are not—as yet. Zilboorg shows how the great involuntary migrations of men of science created more difficulties for the psychoanalyst than in other scientific fields. The profound cultural differences in tradition, custom, language and affective imagery cannot be forcibly ingested and assimilated in a single decade. Furthermore, the author points out that the psychoanalyst was born in an atmosphere of individual therapy; and in times of turmoil the individual seems to lose his immediate direct psychosocial value. The psychoanalyst must either isolate himself from reality or bow to the unreasonable demands of the historical crisis. As a result many will and must succumb to a variety of expediencies, compromises and/or passionate rationalizations.
Zilboorg stresses that many conflicting trends in psychoanalytic circles are various facets of the cultural crisis in which we are all engulfed. He believes that psychoanalysis must eventually decide whether or not it intends to deal with economic sociological and political situations. He considers the recent many rejections of the fundamental postulates of psychoanalysis, a manifestation of disappointment and resentment that came to the psychoanalyst when he found that psychoanalysts could not solve all the world's crying problems.
Robert Waelder believes that the variety of schools of thought and the many unsettled controversies in psychoanalysis is due to the fact that psychoanalysis deals with a highly charged emotional subject matter and experimental control is very difficult, if not impossible. He then shows how J