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Psychoanalysis has represented itself as a value-free science and its practitioners have sought, in applying their knowledge clinically, to reduce value judgments to a minimum. Nonetheless assessments of health and illness, of clinical progress and regression, of adaptation
and maladaptation have always rested and continue to rest on a valuative base that, often implicit, makes up part of what I have called 'the culture of psychoanalysis'. Many of these values derive from the historical rooting of psychoanalysis in the industrial culture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western society. They include delay of gratification, the normative status of long-term, stable, monogamous, heterosexual love relationships, the crucial importance of work, a defined occupational identity, and the clear definition of male and female roles as well as personality characteristics.
Although the rate of social and technological change in the fifty years between Freud's first psychoanalytic efforts and the end of World War II was rapid, even spectacular, it did not begin to have the explosive quality that we have seen in the past twenty-five years. In this book Toffler seeks to extrapolate the ways in which the future will be characterized by even more kaleidoscopic changes that will lead to major revisions in social organization and cultural norms. It is evident that such changes will reflect on the values inherent in our assessments of 'mental health' and 'mature' personality functioning, and therefore on some of the underpinnings of clinical psychoanalysis, if not of its basic theory.
Toffler's position, briefly stated, is that humanity is confronted by contemporary technology with a pervasiveness and rapidity of change whose consequences are precisely akin to Freud's definition of trauma, i.e., an overloading of the nervous system with stimuli that cannot be integrated or discharged. It is this condition that he calls 'future shock', and he suggests that many of us