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To express their gratitude to him as teacher, the colleagues and former students of Dr. Max Schur undertook a work in honor of his seventieth birthday. Unfortunately, Dr. Schur did not live to see the work published. There is reason enough to permit the 'living gift' to stand as its own justification without questioning the value of publishing a heterogeneous set of papers under the somewhat misleading title, The Unconscious Today. The book's many contributors, necessarily presenting a variety of styles and obviously starting with different interpretations of analytic theory, provide a potpourri in which the common threads are to be found as much in the wish to extend clinical observation and to revise theory as in the specific subject headings under which the papers are organized.
It is not a simple matter to be able to know where revision and/or extension of theory are determined by idiosyncratic interpretations and where they are determined by new clinical findings. Extension, elaboration, and revision of theory are not only necessary, they are also the order of the day, fashionable and demanded by many social currents, as clinicians and theoreticians seek to broaden the scope of analysis and to make of it a general psychology. In that search, analysts sometimes fail to remember what Rapaport and others have pointed out: that even unwitting overemphasis on one aspect of analytic theory occurs not infrequently at the expense of other equally important ones. This is not to say that expansion or revision of theory is unnecessary, but simply that they may at times become one-sided and skewed, even a distortion of psychoanalytic theory.
In 1910 Freud wrote to Jung: 'I am becoming more and more convinced of the cultural value of psychoanalysis, and I long for the lucid mind that will draw from it the justified inferences for philosophy and sociology'.1 To find the frontiers of psychoanalysis and to push them forward is as much a part of the Zeitgeist today as it