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Freud's biographers called the first self-analysis the “founding act,” and “a momentous … achievement.” Our seminal view of mentation came from introspection, and our ability to analyze still rests on it. But as transference data engage us theoretically, those from self-study become secondary. The solely intrapsychic shares our attention with the interpersonal, even to its occasional neglect.
Into this narrowing circle steps a classically trained analyst who, upon completing his two-person analysis, did what many of us thought we would: continued to free associate daily on his own. After twenty years and some forty-thousand hours on his own couch, Clifford Anderson emerges carrying a primer of maturational theory that could, unless ignored, affect psychoanalytic thinking as profoundly as did the first self-analysis.
Acknowledging no such intent, Anderson simply brings a conception of the mind that captures what he believes any of us would conclude were we willing to free associate through the resolution of our midlife crisis. “Maturation” as here used does not refer solely to the spontaneous emergence of inborn propensities according to a genetic timetable. It describes a complex process through which we physically utilize extrapsychic elements to facilitate the emergence of our inherited potential. Objects and experiences are not incorporated or partly fantasized and then taken in; nor does the word “object” even appear in his writing.
What Anderson offers takes us beyond a theory of involvement. He seeks to discover how—through daily self-awarenesses—our minds perpetually hypothesize a world. Despite other reactions the theory might evoke, there is up-front appeal, for we learn that the midlife crisis does not, as many believe, portend the twilight of our existence. It is, rather, the dawning of sagacity.
There is an expansiveness to Anderson's work. He displays epochs of intellectual advance in sweeping strokes—then in detail. To him our intellectual grasp so far exc