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Like Arlow and Brenner, who have effected major revisions in Freudian theory, Leo Rangell extends psychoanalytic theory into new areas. His contributions, like theirs, are not patchwork jobs for an ailing theory but rather proposed solutions to important psychoanalytic problems. In the present collection, 35 papers are selected from the more than 300 Rangell has written over the course of four decades.
In Volume I, Action within the Structural View, Rangell re-examines the problem of anxiety in psychoanalytic theory and considers problems of choice, responsibility, and integrity. He provides a set of concepts and constructs dealing with aspects of human behavior that very few psychoanalytic theorists have even considered. As in all his works, his solutions to problems are grounded firmly in the work of Freud and his successors, chief among them Heinz Hartmann, Otto Fenichel, and David Rapaport. Rangell argues that his "postulation of unconscious choice conflict and the contiguous concept of unconscious ego decision-making… is … quite different from the conventional type of oppositional conflict which leads to a solution by compromise formation" (p. 14). To Freud's concept of signal anxiety and of thought as experimental action he appends four additional concepts: "intrapsychic process" as against intersystemic conflict between, for example, ego and id; a new ego function referred to as unconscious decision-making; the syndrome of the compromise of integrity; and the exercise of will as an aspect of ego autonomy.
In "Psychoanalysis, Affects, and the 'Human Core,'" written in 1964, Rangell introduces his concept of "the human core," which is marked by "the unconscious rather than conscious, the intrapsychic rather than internal-external, and the conflictful rather than the conflict-free and autonomous …" (p. 61). This harks back to Ernst Kris's definition of psychoanalysis as human behavior seen from the point of view of unconscious conflict. Of interest in thi