Symposium: Emanuel Peterfreund on Information and Systems Theory

For this, the third in our Symposia on the contributions of noted psychoanalytic theorists, The Psychoanalytic Review has chosen the entire work of Emanuel Peterfreund. This is in contrast to our previous policy of selecting a noteworthy individual book. Peterfreund's contribution, which is in a sense “singular,” is spread over several major papers and is still evolving.

There are many reasons for selecting Peterfreund's theories for discussion. First, his work has suffered from considerable neglect. This has taken place although his training and origins are basically in the mainstream of classical analysis. Peterfreund's credentials attest to this. After graduation from the City College of New York and from the University of Chicago Medical School, he completed his psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In addition, he is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Mt. Sinai Medical School and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Second, he was one of the first to bring attention to the logical and scientific limitations of psychoanalytic metapsychology. Although his criticism appeared in print as early as 1971,1 it has awarded Peterfreund primarily footnote status in the growing literature that increasingly rejects Freud's outdated “scientific” thought and model construction. Finally, and most importantly, he has contributed an avant-garde paradigm for viewing and understanding psychoanalytic data, namely, the use of information and systems theory with its more up-to-date scientific language. Thus, in rejecting metapsychology and particularly ego psychology he has attempted to replace these with a twentieth century scientific model of mind and mental function.

It is curious that Peterfreund in his updating of Freud delivers