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Goldberg proposes to question the unexamined foundations of psychoanalysis. Scholars in most disciplines have been questioning the foundations of their field, demonstrating that issues of belief, bias, influence, and power may determine our basic assumptions. Not that such revisionist re-examination is free from these issues of belief, bias, influence, and power. Of course, in our post-structuralist view, all our examinations and re-examinations will be influenced by such motives. For one example, when feminist historians critique male-centered historiography, they not only want to demonstrate that history needs to consider the role of women. They also want to stake their own (feminist) claim that their approach to historical study should be valued as highly as what has been traditional. Such writers have discovered that to make their mark within their discipline, they need to revise the theory of historical study.1
Arnold Goldberg, as a psychoanalyst, also knows this and knows this more immediately than the historians. But he does not tell us right up front that in writing this book he wants to appropriate a greater influence within traditional psychoanalysis for self psychology. As a result, his project of examining foundational concepts in psychoanalysis becomes subverted by his political aims; his critique is ultimately unsatisfying. This is unfortunate because a thoughtful exploration of the unexamined foundations of every school of psychoanalysis would be welcome indeed.
Goldberg especially wants to demonstrate how rigid we can become when we close ourselves off from curiosity, open inquiry, and ongoing creative efforts toward new integration. We tend to restrict ourselves by idealization and addition to psychoanalytic heroes and their theories. He argues that psychoanalysts' rigid adherence to fixed systems of thought, especially with static, mechanical models, may protect against anxiety and uncertainty. But it forecloses the best kind of open psyc