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This is an intentionally provocative book. Its aim is to state what Schachter believes many serious-minded analysts secretly (or not so secretly) believe has been happening in the professional world of psychoanalysis: namely, that a search has been taking place for a new basis for our therapeutic efforts that will provide greater certainty about the validity of our work. The intention is to liberate the field to pursue its further destiny without being dragged down by erroneous past beliefs.
Schachter aims to change the “climate of opinion”1 of psychoanalysis by demonstrating that the concept of transference as the causal underpinning of a presumably scientific theory of mental life is unsubstantiated by research or by logic. After an extensive and thoughtful review of hotly debated issues that have arisen during recent decades, he concludes that—along with the waning use of dream analysis; the abandonment of uncovering childhood determinants of present-day neurotic pathology; the de-emphasis of sexuality; and the conversion of a one-person orientation within psychoanalytic technique to a two-person, interactive viewpoint—transference, too, must be abandoned as a guide to what psychoanalysis should be. And if transference is to be discarded, then meta-psychology is dead as well.
Schachter maintains that psychoanalysis has to make a paradigm shift, that there needs to be a new conception of what is mutative and therefore therapeutic in psychoanalytic treatment. He reaches back to Freud's early aim of creating a scientific psychology out of a combination of clinical experience and models borrowed from late nineteenth-century biological and neurological science, which came to be recognized as representing false optimism and excessive ambition. Schachter believes that all that remains of the conceptual grounding for our therapeutic efforts are