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This volume is the first of a new annual series in which psychoanalysts and other scientists contribute to the integration of psychoanalysis and contemporary scientific thought. The contributors testify that psychoanalysis can propose fruitful hypotheses and approaches to problems in various areas of empirical research, and that the theories of psychoanalysis may be clarified and tested with the aid of methods and concepts drawn from the behavioral and social sciences. The book contains fifteen papers in five sections—general theoretical, psycholinguistic, developmental, clinical and quantitative, and psychohistorical and psychobiographical.
In his article “Freud's Mechanistic and Humanistic Images of Man” Holt presents Freud's two images of man. He recommends a radical restructuring of metapsychology in order to purge it of its obsolete mechanistic image. The author says, “One of the great advantages of our age, as compared with Freud's, is that we do not have to frame a science of man in mechanistic terms.”
Writing from a background of neurophysiology and psychoanalysis, Frederic G. Worden provides a most lucid and thought-provoking essay, “Questions about Man's Attempt to Understand Himself.” Lawrence S. Kubie's theoretical article on psychological change concludes that
the only psychological change that is enduringly meaningful for individual health, for life in general, or for human culture as a whole is a change in the capacity for further change.
Four papers in the psycholinguistic section illustrate crossfertilization of psychoanalytic concepts and methods with the theories and methods of linguistics and the recent contributions these fields are making to each other.
In a developmental paper, the late George S. Klein delineates six prototypical classes of pleasure experience which appear in infancy and thereafter undergo cognitive and affective elaboration. His study counteracts the prevalent tendency to equate all pleasure with sensual experience.
A research pape