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Buttonhole the most experienced latter-day analyst in camera and usually you will find his views on the practice of psychoanalysis of becoming modesty, guided throughout by an appreciation of the clinical difficulties he may encounter when dealing with even the simplest case. Cast him however in a preceptoral role and more likely than not he will graduate to a cloud-cuckoo land where clinical perspective tends to be lost in a perfectionist mist; so that it becomes difficult at times to distinguish his views on psychoanalysis from a cult of individual and social adaptation.
No doubt this modern tendency may be due in part to the factor of case selection. For if, as seems to be the case in some countries, a preponderance of cases of character maladaptation (sometimes mild) weighs down the analyst's case list it is inevitable that he should end by laying emphasis on personality disorder and in time invoke the state of the total personality, or perhaps it would be better to say of its outer crust, as the ruling criterion of psychoanalysis. Thereby he escapes, to some extent, from the obligation recognized by his predecessors, namely, to cure or alleviate the symptomatic suffering of which the prospective patient complains.
Although Dr. Saul, through sheer weight of clinical experience, has avoided the major pitfalls of this modern type of didactic approach, there are some indications that he has been beguiled by the study of what are now tautologically called 'interpersonal relations' and that his outlook has been considerably influenced by the teachings of Alexander, Rado, Harry Stack Sullivan, and possibly Horney. Witness, for example, his constant play on the themes of dependence, inferiority, loneliness, emotional patterns, corrective experiences, after-education, and, above all, maturity in ego relationships. His clinical illustrations are throughout concerned more with these matters than with the symptom constructions which provided the basis of psychoanalytic