An Appreciative Response

I am exceedingly gratified by the responses to Psychoanalysis and Motivation of the contributors to this issue. These responses indicate areas of shared agreement as well as serious questions I need to consider and challenges I need to meet. As Friedman states, my book is something closer to a textbook. Or, as one dear friend said to me with tongue in cheek, next time you write a book put some meat in it. The length and at times dense writing is the result of my belief that I needed to buttress my hypothesis with a mass of solid evidence since I am putting forward a psychoanalytic theory of motivation that departs in its complexity from any other. In addition, I needed to relate my ideas to earlier theoretical concepts that covered the same or similar territory. And I have used a systems theory that is richer and more dynamic that either “structures” or functions. We follow the progress of each of five motivational needs as a system self-organizes in response to innate and learned response patterns when the need is triggered, then self-stabilizes, then exists in dialectic tension within the system and with other systems for dominance of awareness, and finally undergoes progressive hierarchical rearrangement with maturation and increasing lived experience. I only sketched in the developmental pathways after infancy, and as I discuss, I lost some of the contributors in this part of my endeavor. But no contributors challenged the existence of any of the systems or proposed returning to a dual drive theory. My essential postulates were responded to with a