Beyond Interpretation: Toward a Revised Theory for Psychoanalysis. John E. Gedo. New York:  International Universities Press, 1979,  xiii + 280 pp.

John Gedo is one of the most interesting minds presently engaged at the conceptual frontiers of the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. Among his concerns are the effects of philosophic and professional politics on the beliefs and convictions maintained by the psychoanalytic establishment. Nor does he exempt himself from such effects, so that one encounters in his writing personal reflections comparing ways in which he once entertained certain clinical and theoretical problems with his current points of view on those problems. An intriguing aspect of Gedo's ongoing publications is the record they embody of how a career of a learned and brilliant psychoanalyst actually undergoes transformation. For example, Gedo was, for a time, one of Heinz Kohut's staunchest disciples. Gedo's eventual extrications from the structures of Kohut's thought are recorded in a number of Gedo's recent papers, not to mention his present book Beyond Interpretation, a book that affords a glimpse of the sort of intellectual struggle required to transcend, rather than merely replace, the complacencies of acquired certainties about how to think about a variety of psychoanalytic issues. Gedo's present book is also explicit on the matter of his intellectual development since his collaboration with Arnold Goldberg on Models of the Mind: A Psychoanalytic Theory, which appeared in