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Richard Lasky has given serious students of psychoanalytic theory and technique a volume that illustrates the depth of understanding attainable when unconscious reminiscences are retrieved by a patient within the context of a transference neurosis whose boundaries are strong enough to protect the unfolding of the patient's wishes, defenses, drives, and life story—past, present, and future. In a multitude of clinical examples this process is conducted by an analyst (Lasky) whose integrity and honesty reveal his commitment to a theory that he has obviously used with great benefit to his own psychological and emotional growth and to which he is repaying his debt with a sensitive loyalty, wide-ranging intelligence, and humanistic concern for patients and colleagues alike.
Part I focuses on Freud's dual-drive theory—the history of the drives, their interaction, fusion and defusion, and, perhaps most interesting, the meaning and operation of the libidinal and aggressive drives in the context of the regulatory principles of mental functioning. Lasky not only offers a sophisticated understanding of the metapsychological perspective but also presents the arguments of theorists, for example, Schafer, who argue against the utility of metapsychology for describing and explaining a patient's functioning, especially in the clinical situation. As with metapsychology, so with many concepts that have fallen out of favor for any number of scientific or rhetorical reasons (e.g., because the concept tends to be reductionistic), Lasky, as is often said of Freud, retains a concept that many others discard, demonstrating its value in a specific clinical or extraclinical situation.
In a discussion of the drives, for example in raising the question of “whether one is entitled…to postulate the existence of drives if their specific sources in the biological substrate is unspecifiable…” (p. 9), Lasky's response helps to explore the broader issue of the