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The invitation of the Editor to contribute this essay on the future of psychoanalysis coincides with my own interest in the subject, and my feelings for some years that this topic is in need of attention. An indication of this was my recent article in the Newsletter of the American Psychoanalytic Association, "Psychoanalysis—Where Next?" (Rangell, 1987). I have increasingly felt that it was necessary to ask this question in the face of the history of the last two decades.
In introducing this series (in the January issue of The Quarterly), the Editor notes that analysts today range from those who are excited by new developments to those who feel we are at a point of perilous change. While my position in this span is not at the pole of feeling peril, I am nevertheless over the midline on the side of feeling a sense of gravity at our direction, and a concern over the question of the survival of psychoanalysis, at least as it has been and, I feel, should be.
My point of entry into the subject is not administrative, educational, or organizational, but scientific. The focus of my concern is the tension within the science, and what I consider to be a scientific drift. My primary interest is not the status of psychoanalysis within the general or even the intellectual community, but the condition and directions of psychoanalytic theory within psychoanalysis itself. The breakthrough which ushered in "the century of Freud," making the century now coming to a close memorable for its incremental leap in man's knowledge of himself,