Interpretation and Primitive Psychic Processes: A Kleinian View

The revised theory of psychoanalysis and its technique proposed by John E. Gedo in Beyond Interpretation appears to have arisen from his dissatisfaction with the theoretical framework he was accustomed to and the practice of interpretation he was trained in. It is important to bear in mind, especially for those from a different psychoanalytic school, that his starting point is not Freud's many various, modified, and at time contradictory expositions but the compact general theory of the development of mental function derived from some of Freud's ideas by Hartmann and other ego psychologists. Outsiders, therefore, such as practitioners of the Klein group of the British Society, would find Gedo objecting to principles they do not adhere to (e.g., that only those individuals whose difficulties center on the oedipal constellation are analyzable) or advocating as radical and new, ideas familiar in the British Society since the 1930's (e.g., “material referable to early modes of psychic organization appears in every analysis, and it does so not only as a manifestation of regressive resistance to the Oedipus complex” [p. 33]). They will also find him attacking orthodoxies