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This book is the result of much scholarly effort, clinical experience, and research, especially involving post-traumatic stress disorder. It
grows out of the author's long-standing dissatisfaction with classical psychoanalytic theory. Mardi Horowitz aims to synthesize a wide range of psychodynamic theories, but especially ego psychology and object relations theory. He wishes to integrate the concepts of the cognitive sciences and, ultimately, to introduce an advance in theory, expressed by a new language.
In a chapter entitled "States of Mind," Horowitz defines psychodynamics as focusing "on why maladaptive states occur" and why one cannot "enter or sustain a desired state of mind" (p. 13). One assumes that the noun form, "psychodynamics," as used in the title of the book, is the name of a new theory and that its use is different from the usual use of the word as an adjective describing one metapsychological point of view of psychoanalysis. Its use seems to have the purpose of replacing psychoanalysis as a term and as a theory.
In using the term "state of mind," Horowitz expands on Eric Berne's term "ego states," which Berne used interchangeably with states of mind. Berne credited Paul Federn with the term and with the concept, which referred specifically to the notion that psychosis does not represent the total functioning of the ego but only a particular ego state. Berne based his transactional analysis on this concept, and by eliminating the id, he schematized the mind into "child," "adult," and "parent," as representing ego states which compete with or intrude on each other. Horowitz tells us that he was once pressed to choose between his personal psychoanalysis and therapy with Berne, which were ongoing simultaneously. It does seem that an attempt to reconcile the two positions finds expression in his formulations.
One finds here a conflict model of the mind in which symptoms are compromises between impulse and defense. This sounds like standard psycho