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The psychoanalytic enterprise—especially the various modes of treatment designated “psychoanalytic therapy”—is now in crisis, if only because of the significant decline in the number of patients seeking such treatment. Therefore, it is understandable that some practitioners seek to protect their livelihoods by attempting to discredit criticism, if not the personal integrity of the critics.
From a simply human point of view, I feel some empathy with analysts who trained for years and paid for a very costly personal analysis, only to find that their earning a professional living is in some jeopardy. I suggested as much in my 1993 book (p. xi).
In his Introduction to the “Symposium on the Grünbaum Debate,” Jacobson (1996) offers an excuse for not having invited me to respond to my five critics (p. 500). In Jacobson's view, the post-Freudians achieve immunity against the gravamen of my objections to Freud. That they fail to do so is resoundingly demonstrated by the penetrating writings of Eagle (1983, 1993). Although Schwartz cites Eagle (1983), and Jacobson cites my 1993 book, Jacobson turns a blind eye to my book's prefatory statement about Eagle's pertinent (1983) demonstration: “Eagle … has contended in detail that the upshot of my assessment of Freud's classical arguments applies no less to the neorevisionist doctrines of [Kohutian] self-psychology, and of recent object relations theory” (Grünbaum, 1993, p. xii), a statement on which I elaborated (pp. 37-38). Eagle (1993) strengthens his telling conclusions even more. Incidentally, inasmuch as Jacobson invokes