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With great skill, Nathan Leites has probed the writings on psychoanalytic theory and systematically uncovered serious flaws in the use of words and concepts. His work, which deserves the careful attention
of psychoanalysts, is written in a satirical style that is penetrating and cutting, yet saved from outright destructiveness by his overriding desire for clarity. It readily evokes a mixture of laughter and pain in a reader seriously invested in psychoanalysis: it hurts to laugh at the vagaries, pretensions, circumlocutions, and logical fallacies demonstrated in these pages.
In its critique of analytic theorizing this book is not an isolated effort, although it is unique in its unrelenting investigation of the pitfalls hidden in the language of theoretical formulations. The recent contributions of Schafer, Peterfreund, and Basch have pursued a critical examination of analytic theory, giving expression to a widening discontent with metapsychology and emphasizing the unfortunate gap between clinical observation and interpretation, and the domain of metapsychology. Waelder, in his reply to the criticism of analysis by philosophers of science, complained that the critics of analysis choose metapsychology as the ground for debate rather than lower levels of the hierarchy of theory formation where most of the daily work is done. Yet much of the literature of psychoanalysis is clothed in the garb of metapsychology and even case reports are condensed and transformed into abstract language that distorts the experience it attempts to describe. Aside from pained laughter this book may well stimulate curiosity and further inquiry into the problems it brings into focus.
Freud developed his metapsychology in an effort to fathom the nature of the apparatus that might account for the phenomena he had observed in dreams and neuroses. He described it as an expendable superstructure based on clinical experience, as a conceptual scaffolding whose raison d'être was its usefulnes