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In this short and scholarly book, Sandler & Dreher take up one of the vexed issues of psychoanalysis and offer us what Arnold Cooper describes in his preface as ‘a radical critique of our own self-satisfaction’. They make it clear from the outset that they do not expect to solve the puzzle through a unifying theory of aims, but rather they offer a theory about aims which they hope will offer clarification.
They choose a historical approach which helps the reader find their bearings and which, as the authors argue, seems the only viable approach. They present their review of the development of thinking on aims of psychoanalysis decade by decade, after an initial chapter on Freud's own views. Thus they trace: the early Freudians in the 1920s; consolidation in the pre-war decade; the emigration of analysts and a period of transition; the 1950s and the widening-scope discussions; heightening tensions; the 1970s and the flowering of pluralism; and pragmatism and integration in contemporary psychoanalysis. The chapter on Freud's view of aims reminds us again how he kept in mind so many issues which have puzzled us since, and furthermore how he could countenance and acknowledge his own changing views. Sandler & Dreher's general historical account depicts a move from analytic hubris to a more limited view of what can be achieved. Freud did this in his own lifetime, shifting from what the authors describe as
an optimistic, at times even idealistic, view of what analysis can achieve [to] … a more realistic (one could say pessimistic) attitude in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’
In that paper Freud outlines his view on aims that still stands above most, and is quoted by the authors: