The Boundaries of Psychoanalytic Data and Technique: A Critique of Gedo's Beyond Interpretation

This interesting, complex, wide-ranging, and ambitious monograph is a continuation of Gedo's earlier volume with Goldberg entitled Models of the Mind (1973). Gedo proposes no less than a new theoretical paradigm for psychoanalysis and a new theory of therapy based on that paradigm. In this review I will deal first with the theoretical paradigm, then with its application to therapy. The paradigm is described as unifying the disparate models of the earlier volume.

I can best provide a point of departure for my critique by citing in full Gedo's succinct closing summary:

To encompass the infinite variety of meaningful human goals and values encountered in clinical practice, no theory of the mind consisting of combinations and permutations of aggression, libido, narcissism, and the defenses against their derivatives can suffice. In the place of such overly restrictive categories, I am attempting to develop a theory organized around the central concept of a relatively permanent hierarchy of aims, both organismic and subjective. I believe that this hierarchy of goals and values should be conceptualized as the self-organization, a concept that can anchor psychoanalytic