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What if the opposite of negative thinking is not positive thinking but critical thinking? In other words, the alternative to viewing things pessimistically, that is, in a way that skews reality to be bleaker than it is, would not be to view things optimistically, that is, in a way than skews reality to be rosier than it is, but to view things as realistically as possible (and hope to change them for the better in the future). Morris Eagle's new book, Core Concepts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, a companion volume to his Core Concepts in Classical Psychoanalysis, provides strong support for the value and necessity of critical thinking. Its central arguments are bold and truculent: that we ought to abandon the concepts of transference, countertransference, and projective identification because they are poorly defined and explicated and that psychoanalytic thinking and writing is jeopardized by a failure to be committed to the pursuit of evidence, both clinical and empirical.
Indeed, this book culminates with Eagle's affirmation of a concern raised by Paul Meehl (Meehl, 1995) that psychoanalysis might be consistent with “a Lakatosian degenerating program” (p. 217). (Lakatos [2001] was a philosopher of science who defined a degenerating research program as one that deploys self-protective strategies, which interfere with the accumulation of new knowledge). Although Lakatos famously named psychoanalysis as an example of a pseudoscience, Eagle's project here is not a rejectionist one because he remains avidly invested in helping psychoanalysis to evolve. Eagle believes that psychoanalysis must be willing to take up the challenge of renewing and elevating our intellectual effort to embrace evidence. What is truly distinctive about Eagle's voice is that whereas he intends to encourage respect for empirical research, he also defends the importance of clear, succinct thinking. Unlike the advocates of clinical science who regard philosophical as a derogatory term, Eagle apprec