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Psychoanalysis or Mind and Meaning, by Charles Brenner, is a book not to be reviewed so much as appreciated. Brenner tells us that he has spent two years collecting in one place all the conclusions about the way the mind works that he has arrived at over his more than fifty years as an analyst. He reached these conclusions by proceeding as all scientists proceed, developing hypotheses or theories, collecting data, and then determining whether or not the data support or contradict those hypotheses and theories. And on more than one occasion, he has framed a new conclusion to replace his earlier conclusions or the conclusions of others, including Freud's. For example, he is most convincing when he marshals the data against Freud's conclusion that there is a principle of mental activity that is beyond the pleasure principle.
By way of a historical aside, he tell us that, while he was still a candidate at New York Psychoanalytic Institute, he attended a session in which the question was raised of whether or not psychoanalytic theories had factual evidence to support them. He summarizes the facts that Freud had marshaled in support of the repetition compulsion. Although he does not say so directly, the reader is likely to conclude from Brenner's discussion of the repetition compulsion that, in this instance, he agreed with Freud's method but not with Freud's conclusion.
Brenner acknowledges that Freud also had doubts about the data, that conscious unpleasure can cover over unconscious pleasure, that pain can gratify a masochistic wish or a need for punishment. But Freud, not letting it go at that, postulated a death drive that “offers strong evidence in favor of the view that repetition is more important in mental life than are the attempts to gain pleasure and avoid unpleasure” (p. 16), Brenner notes. He points out