Psychoanalytic Theory in the Context of Contemporary Psychology: The Helen Block Lewis Memorial Address

This article represents a tribute to the late Helen Block Lewis's commitment to integrating psychology and psychoanalysis. The current status of the formal structure of psychoanalytic theory was reviewed in relation to recent developments in general psychology. Specific attention was paid to the psychodynamic or motivational perspective, the structural perspective, and the genetic or developmental perspective as proposed by Rapaport. Following an examination of current trends in psychoanalysis and of the shift from a drive-, hydraulic energy model toward a relational model, specific proposals were made about the role of emotions as motives, and the implications of the tension between attachment or affiliation versus autonomous or self-esteem needs. In the structural perspective it was proposed that, as in social psychology, emphasis has shifted from the id, ego, superego model to a more specific focus on self schemas and belief systems. The recent emphasis in cognitive and social psychology on out-of-awareness processes suggests a new interest in the so-called topographical model of conscious and unconscious processes. At the developmental level the dominance of the object relations model meshes well with recent child research. The need to recognize the continuing and lifelong dialectic tension between communion or affiliation and agency or self-expressiveness (“love and work”), as expressed in relation to societal expectations through the life span, was stressed as an alternative to the classic psychosexual stages or to the “developmental tilt” toward the infant's experience that characterizes much of modern psychoanalytic theorizing.