You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Just as Roy Schafer's “An Overview of Heinz Hartmann's Contributions to Psychoanalysis” (1970) was half about Hartmann, half about Schafer, and all about Freud, I write half about Hartmann, half about Freud, and all about Schafer. I shall “defend” (defend in quotes because it is largely a negative defense) Hartmann against compliments in Schafer's overview that he would not have wanted, e.g., that he cracked the dualistic framework of Freudian thought, and against criticisms that he did not deserve, e.g., that his work was flawed by allegiance to a natural science approach.
The overview rhetorical strategies I question are:
The implicit assumption that psychic energy, postulated for explanatory purposes (i.e., with qualities), metapsychology, the biological vantage, the natural science approach, and psychoanalysis being (or having prospects of becoming) a general psychology all stand or fall together. Arguments against one should count against the others.
The implicit assumption that arguments against simplistic dualisms or the simplistic deployment of dualisms count against any dualistic thinking.
Joseph H. Smith, M.D. is Supervising and Training Analyst, The Washington Psychoanalytic Institute; Co-Editor, Psychiatry and the Humanities; and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
The implicit assumption that any reifying or anthropomorphizing is fallacious; i.e., in science, figuration is forbidden.
The implicit assumption that one can detach and discard the most general level of theory (metapsychology) and save all the rest, sometimes covering and sometimes not covering an intention to attack the level of abstraction with the greatest conceptual power in order to change all the rest.
The explicit assumption that Hartmann's emendations, elaborations, clarifications, and coordinations of Freudian theory were elegantly in accord with what was logically consistent in Freud's work (though undeveloped and unsystematic