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.
Psychoanalysis is in the midst of a crucial transitional phase. We are struggling with the problem of how to assimilate and utilize our past traditions to best serve our current needs. Many of the most important contributions to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice in the past ten years have been concerned, either explicitly or implicitly, with this broad and complex project of assimilation—the sorting out of what is still useful and the discarding of what no longer applies. The most creative contributions of the past decade along these lines include Gill (1982), Schafer (1983), Pine (1985), Ogden (1986), and Bollas (1987).
Psychoanalysis was invented and has been dominated by Freud, whose awesome genius, range, and impact places him as one of the most important and influential minds of all of western civilization. The classical model, in its intricacy, its elegance, its comprehensive reach into every facet of human endeavors, is truly, even after all these years, a stunning achievement. Yet Freud was inevitably a man of his time. The drive model, which houses his clinical theorizing, was derived from the late 19th-century cultural and scientific milieu in which he came to intellectual maturity, grounded in Newtonian physics and exploding with the creative