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The present text attempts to study, at least in one chapter (Chapter 8), the gamut of psychological disorders from the perspective of active/passive modalities of encounter with both the self and the world. The author is sensitive to the narcissism and rage present in passive-aggressive, masochistic, and borderline behavior; she is aware of the extensive secondary gains which passive doldrums frequently contain, but her insights go little beyond this. Instead of the careful study the problem deserves, the reader is exposed to a mixture of repeated misunderstandings of Freudian theory and to behavioristic-like techniques, e.g., “Tease the patient into expressing anger.” Or, abandoning psychological study completely, the author resorts to moralistic exhortations, e.g.: “The psychologist, sociologist and wise political leader and all people of goodwill—must help in the work of cleaning up these new confusions [i.e., mental conflicts],” or, “We must teach reality to neurotics, schizophrenics, children and others”! These excerpts reflect a level of simplistic conceptualization evident throughout the text.
Dr. Fried's misreading of Freud is of the same caliber. She dismisses his understanding of the role of anxiety and then goes on to state that anxiety is a warming sign of the ego's impending weakness, a signal of danger coming. She reads Freud as saying that trauma is mastered via the repetition compulsion, and she comes to the conclusion that he misunderstood the facts. Had he only realized that people are involved in a cognitive error, had he only taught people that the future need not be like the past, they presumably would not be neurotic. That the repetition compulsion serves neurotic ends, that Freud never implied that it is a realistic means of overcoming a past trauma, but that it is an intrapsychic force which profoundly affects the psyche's self-understanding and interpretation of reality, and that it can be dissipated by intrapsychic awareness: all of this app