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In recent years, psychoanalysts have been surprised by the challenges and politically motivated criticisms addressed to them by various social scientists. These challenges have been rejected as impertinent, unenlightened impositions by outsiders rather than properly comprehended, discussed, or rebutted. In part, the criticisms have extended the
new conception of psychoanalysis which has been elaborated mainly by nonanalysts and which is gradually gaining wider currency. Until now, however, no connection has been made between such criticisms and the discontent with the present status of psychoanalytic research which is variously documented in the psychoanalytic literature of recent years. It is precisely this connection that Horn seeks to make by appealing directly—and eruditely—to the psychoanalysts' own dissatisfactions. In the course of the last forty years, psychoanalysis has imperceptibly retreated from the theory of culture and from the striving to become a general psychology. This twofold self-restriction, resulting in the individual therapeutic function of psychoanalysis, only rarely lamented, is interpreted as a societally relevant phenomenon. Tendencies inherent in the development of society and the conditions of the analysts' professional socialization can explain this self-restriction and may transform the analysts' astonishment into a more adequate self-understanding.