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This book includes contributions by Franz Alexander, Erik H. Erikson, Heinz Hartmann, Eduardo E. Krapf, and René A. Spitz which
are already available from other sources, informative surveys of the latest developments in psychoanalysis, and several significant original papers which are published here for the first time.
Mitscherlich's Aggression and Adjustment contains a very comprehensive analysis of the impact on the structure of the individual of the changes in the structure of our society. Factors such as technical progress, increase of population, the loss of accepted values, have brought new and challenging demands for adjustment which result in a decided inadequacy of all interpersonal institutions. The individual, in an effort to protect himself against the all-pervading anxiety thus created, erects an enormous security apparatus which leads to ever-mounting aggression and increasing libidinal depletion. The task of culture, as Mitscherlich sees it, is to force the death instinct to serve eros.
In his critique of psychoanalysis, Mitscherlich indicates that Freud failed to consider adequately the specific demands of the external world, by which instinctual control is determined. Inadequate instinctual control, for example, could possibly be viewed as due to a premium society might place on uninhibited instinctual gratification. Mitscherlich reproaches the analyst, who must feel the same difficulties of adjustment as his patient, for letting society lay down the norms in relation to which his cure is directed. Psychoanalysis, he believes, has not yet succeeded in bringing into synoptic view the relative 'autonomy of the social manipulations of drives and affects and the individual's specific life history, so as to permit a balance between both dynamics… To reduce a patient's once experienced threat of death to the status of an infantile bogeyman, the therapeutic process would also have to eliminate the terror emanating from socially tolerated inhuman beh