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Developmental processes: heinz werners selected writings. Edited by Sybil S. Barten and Margery B. Franklin. New York: International Universities Press, Vol. 1 and 2, 1978
Unlike the characters in Pirandello's play, psychoanalysis is not in search of an author. It has had its author for the last century. But like the characters, perhaps, psychoanalysis has been in search of a conceptual schema, a model which can break its intellectual isolation and serve as an organizing frame of reference for analytic findings.
Reviewing the history of psychoanalytic thought, we can distinguish several attempts to formulate psychoanalytic concepts within an integrating framework or model drawn from another scientific domain. They have varying degrees of cogency, and all are more or less wanting. First there is the neurophysiological model marked by Freud's “Project for a Scientific Psychology”. While this approach has generally fallen into disuse, several of Freud's early concepts have recently been reexamined by Pribram and Gill (1976). Next there is the sociological or anthropological model, as revealed in Freud's “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” and “Civilization and its Discontents”. More recently, there have been attempts within American psychology to incorporate psychoanalytic concepts within a behavioral and associationist approach, as represented by the work of