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To the consternation of its adherents, classical psychoanalysis has been the unintentional inspiration for a variety of revisionist approaches to its basic theoretical and technical assumptions. Despite the power of Freud's influence on theory and technique, not to mention the political
strength of his close followers, individual psychoanalysts have found in their disagreements with the content of classical psychoanalysis a rich vein of inspiration for the promulgation of competing ideas, some of which have led to recognizable schools of psychoanalytic thought.
Ironically, these competing schools of analysis, although initially receiving intense criticism from advocates of the classical approach, have nevertheless had aspects of their core revisions quietly incorporated into classical analysis. However, this has occurred without acknowledgment of either an agreement with these new approaches, or of the annexation of these new ideas; often, those defending the classical approach have simply claimed that the new school's major tenets have been there all along in the classical approach, but without previous emphasis on their importance. This retrospectively defensive and adaptive aspect of classical psychoanalysis has often made it difficult to identify where a new school ends and where it has been simultaneously demoted in importance and seamlessly submerged into classical analysis, as a means by which the latter resists the essential incompatibility of the new approach with its own.
New schools of psychoanalytic theory and technique have clustered around two poles. In Europe and South America, Kleinian psychoanalysts have focused on the preverbal mental life of the first year of life in order to postulate a series of fundamental and supposedly universal unconscious dynamics that, in their view, inevitably determine the transferences generated during the conduct of an analysis. The French psychoanalytic world, on the other hand, has chosen the path of deconstructing