Alexander's Psychoanalysis of The Total Personality*

The series of Freud's writings which established the new psychology of the ego and the new theory of the instincts, the so-called “Metaapsychologie,” came to an end in 1923 with the publication of Das Ich und das Es. The novel ideas contained in these two lines of speculation were met, even within psychoanalytic circles, with hardly a uniformly warm reception. Many felt, particularly in this country, that speculation and hypothesis had been carried to lengths which were scientifically dubious and ill founded, that the principles of empiric objectivity which had hitherto informed psychoanalytic investigations had been ruthlessly betrayed, and that the new doctrines had as little clinical value, therapeutically speaking, as they had foundation. The seven years which have elapsed since then have shown how shortsighted this view was. One failed to recall what the course of science had been with regard to hypothesis and its verification, that almost all important progress in science has resulted from an hypothetical formulation, out of the blue, so to speak, on the part of some brilliant creative genius, which later on, submitted to objective tests, has proved of incalculable practical value to mankind. That such hypotheses evolve “out of the blue” is of course false. They evolve only in the minds of those who are so saturated in the material and in the ways of thought appropriate to their fields of activity that they take on the character of a well-grounded intuition rather than that of a spontaneous, unfathered idea. One cannot, for example, imagine that Pavlov, great genius that he is, could have hit upon this formulation: its whole context was too alien to the materials and modes of his thought.

Yet one cannot quarrel with a healthy scepticism toward the new