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What do psychoanalysts want? Presumably they want sex, power, respect, success, relationships, and all the other things desired by most people. This book on the aims of psychoanalysts addresses not this question, but the rather more theoretical issue of the stated goals of psychoanalytic treatment. Organized in a decade-by-decade account of the main lines of thinking on this question, this book provides an enticing, yet compact, introduction to many of the issues that have dominated psychoanalytic thinking over the last 80 years or so.
As the authors ably demonstrate, the question of aims is inextricably tied up with issues both of the nature of mental health and of psychoanalytic technique. Aims can be thought about in terms of an ideal state that psychoanalysts are attempting to help their patients attain—or at least get closer to—and also in terms of the techniques and procedures used in the process. Both perspectives presume an at least implicit goal that the analysis is heading toward. Also related to the question of aims are issues of the relation of individuals to society and of the psychodynamic aspect of life to the social. As the authors further imply, the issue of aims also poses the question of the relationship between analysis as therapy and analysis as research, an issue that was present from the moment that the analytic community started to accept that not all (if any) patients attained the ideal outcomes described in analytic theory. An exploration of psychoanalytic aims is therefore, in a sense, a history of most of what has concerned psychoanalytic thinking.
The range of analytic goals that have been proposed over the decades is large and diverse. Among them are to make the unconscious conscious; to modify the tyrannical superego; to attain the