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The proposition on which Faces in a Cloud rests is that theories of personality reflect the most profound life experiences of their creators. To demonstrate this, the authors examine four metapsychological theories drawn from psychoanalysis: those of Freud, Jung, Reich and Rank. So far, the project is straightforward but not surprising. Presumably it helps in weighing the value of a theory to know where it is colored by personal intrusions.
Surprise is in store, however. In the last chapter Stolorow and Atwood reveal that they do not believe any of the theories. In agreement with George Klein they think that psychoanalytic theory should remain clinical, where its genius lies, and not branch out into speculations about instinctual energies, collective images, and orgone power, all of which seem remote from other thinking in the natural sciences. To remain clinical means to stay in the realm of intentionality and the personal meaning of subjective experience, the realm in which communication takes place in psychoanalytic treatment. “Taking the experiencing person and his frame of reference as the point of departure, the clinical theory of psychoanalysis moves beyond ‘pure’ phenomenology, says Klein, in that it includes assumptions about disavowed intentions and unconscious meanings — reasons, aims, purposes and functions of which the individual is unaware” (Stolorow & Atwood, 1979, p. 178). Metapsychology, with its natural science pretensions, is irrelevant.
How, then, does one proceed? In making their analysis of the four theories and theorists the authors choose as their focus the “representational world,” a concept that owes something to Piaget, Kelly, Binswanger, and Sandler and Rosenblatt. The representational world is “the organized array of representations and associated affects which pervade the person's subjective experiences” (p. 42). It constitutes “a