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What is a theory for? Popper (1959) suggested: “Theories are nets cast to catch what we call ‘the world’: to rationalize, to explain, and to master it. We endeavour to make the mesh ever finer and finer” (p. 59). Here Popper captures several purposes for theories: to predict and control, to show how one thing causes another, and to place something within a network of logical and semantic relations. These functions may be taken as complementary or as radical alternatives, depending on where one stands. One might also take him up on his charming metaphor and set out to tighten the weave, to patch holes that might let important phenomena slip through, or to plait a larger net. Another function of a theory might be to ground a practice.
In her rigorous and demanding first book, Linda A. W. Brakel offers a mixture of answers to this important question. She has several major aims: to show that psychoanalysis has a foundation of theoretical principles that make it a coherent philosophical, scientific, and clinical enterprise; to make respectable the primary processes of the mind—a-rational thinking, as she refers to it, rather than irrational—not as an impoverishment of rationality, but as the basis of thought; and for her