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During the past thirty-odd years the task of appraising essays on psychoanalytic theory has become increasingly arduous and responsible. This however is not due, as might lightly be assumed, to elaborate advances in psychoanalytical knowledge made during the period. There is of course a legend sedulously if not too openly cultivated in some quarters that in recent years psychoanalysis has made spectacular advances on all fronts. In fact the difficulty lies in quite the opposite direction. Until a few years before the death of Freud, the principles of psychoanalysis represented in effect his considered findings and one could well treat most extensions of his theory as either amplifying it in minor respects or as timid but no doubt ambitious efforts to blaze new theoretical trails.
Since Freud's death the more erratic of these efforts have inevitably acquired the sanction of sheer repetition, a form of group suggestion that requires the most rigid of disciplinary controls. In fact most of these speculative efforts have consisted of hypothetical reconstructions of early phases of mental development concerning which we have no direct psychoanalytic information. In other words, from the time when Freud loosened his disciplined grasp of psychoanalytic thinking, metapsychology, (a term that is not so popular as it once was), has in many cases tended to develop into an obsessional form of metaphysical speculation which in my opinion has an unmistakable Jungian bent.
This is perhaps most clearly indicated by what might be called a shift from unconscious to preconscious theory and valuation involving even the canonization of such Jungian terms as 'individuation' for example, or for the matter of that, the 'self', which originally led to the most inextricable confusion among