Foreword

This is the sixth of a series of special issues of The Psychoanalytic Review—and the previously incorporated Psychoanalysis—prepared and edited by me over the past two decades. As is evident from the main themes and authors of the successive installments listed in the Fall 1968 Postscript essay, from the first the purpose of our sequence has been to encourage continuing search into the relevance of psychoanalysis to all the spheres of human existence.

Our assumption remains as before that friends of psychoanalysis share a continuing responsibility to rededicate themselves to the effort made by Freud and others to explore civilizations (as well as egos) and their discontents. This Issue grew out of an intensified need to explore the aid that contemporary psychoanalysis can—and should—offer in understanding ourselves and our policies in the midst of deepening predicaments. All the contributors to the present Issue respond to the challenge eagerly.

Two sets of questions which are now at turning points in today's public discussions are given particular emphasis here:

1. the relationship between Freud and Marx and between the current variants of psychoanalysis and the rewer Marxisms;

2. the values and limits of the perspectives introduced into psychoanalysis by Erik Erikson, especially in the variants of psychohistory which have struck root among great numbers of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and others who are friendly to psychoanalysis.

The two sharply contrasting essay-reviews which follow below discuss a striking recent book by Russell Jacoby. The work's expressive title and subtitle—Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing—communicate its message concisely, telling us that Jacoby shares Herbert Marcuse's view that Freud's interpreters, especially those who have concentrated on therapies, distort or conceal Freud's central commitment to a “radical emancipatory critique” of prevailing structures of society and cul