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Joseph Lichtenberg's book is a remarkable compendium on psychoanalytic thinking about motivation. In it Lichtenberg offers a reconceptualization of motivation, a modification of psychoanalytic theory that effectively preserves the insights of classical psychoanalysis while bringing them into the wider scientific world of infant and child observers, ethologists, neurophysiologists, and philosophers of science. He is to be applauded because he offers us a theory of motivation that, even if we do not accept it in its entirety, can at least serve as a starting point for consideration and reconsideration.
Of course, Lichtenberg is not alone in suggesting that psychoanalytic motivational theory requires reformulation. Out of numerous examples, we will cite two: Modell,1 who points to well-established conclusions from ethological findings to contend that instinct, as representing a motivational source solely from within, must be reconsidered, that no biological entity can be considered apart from interacting with its environment; and Sandler,2 who suggests that a revision of drive theory is necessary if we are to take into consideration what is known from the consulting room about object relations, asserting that the desire for sexual expression, as pressing as it may be under certain circumstances, is secondary to the need for safety when the individual is threatened with loss of connectedness to the needed object.