Editor’s Introduction

Psychoanalysis, now well into its second century as an intellectual discipline and a method of treatment, faces a challenge that comes with maturity both for individuals and for institutions. If we are to remain vital and generative (following Erikson 1950), if we are to avoid the kind of stagnation that comes with complacency, we must take hard looks both at who we are and at how we have become who we are.

This is especially important because psychoanalysis is, on the one hand, a discipline that is designed to influence the lives of people who come to us in great need of help with their suffering and on the other hand a method that is plagued by uncertainty about both its concepts and its efficacy. Because of this, psychoanalysis, and individual psychoanalysts, are vulnerable to being influenced by charismatic figures and by ideas that are compelling but not yet fully examined.

Like psychoanalytic treatment itself, the examination of what we have become as a discipline and a profession is certain to be arduous and painful. The problem goes back to the beginning, to Freud’s tortured confession to Fliess that “I no longer believe in my neurotica” (1897, p. 259). We see in this cri de coeur and in Freud’s confession later in the letter that personal resonances shaped his theorizing. Sustaining the seduction hypothesis, he acknowledges, would entail indicting the fathers of hysterics as perverts, “not excluding my own” (p. 259). Exploring the personal provenance of our theories brings with it personal torment.

Some 35 years after Freud wrote to Fliess the problem surfaced again, publicly and prominently. Theory had changed radically during the 1920’s—the centrality of aggression and of signal anxiety are only two of the most prominent changes—and analysts had to account for how they could have believed that they had cured patients despite

lacking the concepts that were by 1930 seen as essential to the therapeutic impact of psychoanalytic treatment. Edward Glover set hi