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In a precise and lucid presentation Gitelson discusses and clarifies the relationship between psychoanalysis and dynamic psychiatry. He attempts to show the derivation of the latter from psychoanalysis and to point out the significant differences between the two. Dynamic theories of personality are those which are based on the operation of forces or shifts of energy and such theories existed prior to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a dynamic theory but it is not the only one and there are psychodynamic theories of personality today which are not psychoanalytic. Gitelson traces the historical evolution of dynamic theories from primitive man up to the epochal contribution of Freud and Breuer in 1893, which in effect ushered in the discovery of the unconscious and the demonstration of its quality of dynamism.
In the historical development of psychiatry in America, the groundwork for dynamic psychogenesis was prepared independently in the last decade of the nineteenth century by the development of the psychobiologic school of Adolf Meyer. It was upon this fertile soil that psychoanalysis arrived and upon which it took root. As Gitelson points out, with all of Meyer's originally favorable analytic orientation, the one omission of the psychobiologic school was its failure to ever really accept the theory of the unconscious. By this omission, it limited itself and failed to evolve a unified theory which would explain the multitude of behavioral facts and which would enable it to develop simple pragmatism. American psychiatry has become dynamic psychiatry as we know it today through a synthesis of the psychobiology of Adolf Meyer and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud.
The steady increase in the influence of psychoanalysis on the practice of American psychiatry, especially on psychotherapy, has made for so complete a rapprochement between psychiatry and psychoanalysis as to obscure the boundary between the two. Gitelson then carefully differentiates between psycho