To date, the history of psychoanalysis has been written by analysts or historians who sympathize with the official establishment or who identify with the mainstream—often defined as a direct line to Freud's thought and to the revisions of Freud by his disciples in the form of psychoanalytic ego psychology. These disciples have constituted the psychoanalytic canon, which implies the domination of a particular metapsychology, specific codes of technique, and a definition of what is and is not psychoanalysis. Official historians treat mavericks in the psychoanalytic movement as if they were deviants, or downright pathological; their ideas are often dismissed with ad hominem arguments, misrepresentations, and tendentious attacks. Seldom are their experiments discussed historically and critically, that is to say, with an appropriate empathy and understanding of the dilemmas of these men and their movements in their own day.