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As is also, inevitably, the situation with a patient in therapy, no sooner had Sigmund Freud begun his adventure in psychoanalysis when resistance and opposition came to the fore. There were Jung and Adler. From within his very own inner circle came Ferenczi and Rank, soon to be followed by a host of others. In recent years, the object relations and self psychology schools of thought have emerged. Unfortunately, this multiplicity of ideas did little to enhance the scientific status of psychoanalytic theory and therapy.
In making the change from basic scientific research to psychology, Freud did not carry with him the attitude and methodology that characterized his earlier work in biology and neurophysiology. Freud thus set a pattern for all subsequent work in the field. Whether adherence to a strictly empirical approach would have allowed the tapping of the hidden gold mine of churling contradictory forces in the mind is a difficult question to answer. Nevertheless, the conspicuous absence of an acceptable scientific attitude has left its mark in the form of unjustified speculation and inadequate presentation and validation of the relevant data. In addition, psychoanalytic studies, for the most part, display poor writing, a lack of lucidity, and an indifference to the simplest and basic tenets of scientific methodology. Thus the field has left itself wide open to all kinds of criticism, ranging from the most fair and rational to the most bizarre. A book that comes close to the former is the one under review.
Zvi Giora is a clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Tel Aviv University, and his theoretical orientation is that of cognitive psychology. In The Unconscious and the Theory of Psychoneuroses, Giora attempts a rigorous investigation into the very foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice. He is quite