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This book grew out of a 1996 conference arranged by the Freudian faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis to assess changes in Freudian practice over the last 50 years. Comprising 13 chapters and four section introductions, the book poses the customary challenges of such collections to writers, editors, and readers; organizing motifs are varyingly developed by the editors and observed by the writers,
and readers will likely experience a mixture of considerable interest in certain chapters and a frustration over the lack of integration. This review refers to the book's high points.
Carolyn Ellman's introduction usefully anticipates some of the foci of the following papers. Describing the currently weak consensus regarding the essentials of Freudian analysis, she turns to an outline of Freud's 1923 criteria: the existence of unconscious mental processes, the recognition of resistance and repression, and the importance of sexuality in the Oedipus complex. She notes how these criteria retain varying degrees of importance, with oedipal dynamics undergoing demotion in such formulations as Rangell's. She then refers to current controversies, misleadingly defined, over whether analysis is to be conceived in terms of a one- or two-person psychology, and the corollary question of whether the therapeutic process is driven by the intersubjective interplay of analyst and patient, or the growth of a “benign knowing” of the patient by both patient and analyst.
In the first chapter Arnold Richards and Arthur Lynch review the shift from ego psychology to contemporary conflict theory. They trace primary divergences in the theory of therapeutic action back to different views of analysis held by Sterba and Strachey. For Sterba, analysis involved the development of a modification of the ego, a split between an experiencing and an observing ego. Strachey instead stressed internalization of the analyst's superego. Richards and Lynch regar