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The stated purpose of this book is to redefine psychoanalysis as theory, to show what is distinctive about it, and to confront challenges to its scientific status as so defined. The theory is in crisis, Edelson thinks, because its practitioners have allowed it to be loaded down with “a hodgepodge of theoretical accretions” (p. xv) that, while therapeutically useful perhaps, do not form an essential part of the discipline.
The book itself is something of a hodgepodge, containing a number of occasional articles disguised as chapters, but the unevenness that this method of construction entails has been relatively well smoothed over, and in a lucid Introduction (“Core Theory and Case Study in Psychoanalysis”) Edelson provides a working roadmap of what follows.
Psychoanalysis, for Edelson, is a theory of causal relations; what it causally explains is, by and large, what at first looks inexplicable: mental states, dream contents, and the like that seem to be cut off from the rest of mental life, from facts in the world, or from normal action. The ways in which he takes the theory to be distinctive involve some choices about the weight to be given to various causal factors. The causal origins of the symptoms to which psychoanalysis addresses itself are to be found in specifically psychic reality, rather than in actual events, even traumatic ones; in the quest for sexual pleasure rather than the quest for objects; in fantasy rather than memory; and so on (p. xxi).
On the whole, Edelson comes out remarkably close to Freud, in spite of a disposition to approach psychoanalysis as a fully contemporary science. Throughout the book he is moved by a desire to put psychoanalytic theory in a position to answer critiques of its methodology and status as a science. It is