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Since Thomas French ranks as a major figure in psychoanalysis, we are justified in expecting much from him and thus equally justified in being all the more disappointed if the banquet we expected turns into something of a brunch.
The Selected Papers of Thomas French spans the labors of over forty years. It reflects the scholarship of a man actively committed to resolve serious issues confronting psychoanalysis. But from the first to the last paper the impression abides that French has backtracked toward a rapprochement with academic psychology and that on these roads back psychoanalysis may have given up more ground than it gained. Though French has advanced areas of the analytic profession (for example, psychosomatic medicine), he has inconsistently proceeded toward the profession's frontiers. Aside from the understandably numerous references to Freud in these thirty papers, die names of masters like Abraham, Jones, Fenichel, and Kris are mentioned only once or twice— and Hartmann, incidentally, is not mentioned at all. Now this is not such an idle observation. Reading this book from cover to cover one misses the fine-spun traditional fabric of psychoanalysis. The vocabulary is all there, but its essence and tone are damaged. While French plows his fields of interest, the psychoanalytic tools used occasionally resound a bit hollow in his hands. The problem stems partly from French's admirable endeavors to integrate and synthesize psychoanalytic concepts with learning theory (say, Pavlovian psychology). Certainly this can be a valuable and meaningful undertaking, but not when analytic material so frequently forfeits its complexity through such an alliance.
French is very keen on bringing us all together, but the cost to the substance of psychoanalysis can at times become excessive. For instance, when trying to reconcile the “insight” of Koehler's gorillas with psychoanalytic insight, French writes:
If a patient succeeds in gaining “insight” into a repressed wish, he ha