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Jacob Arlow is one of the most well known and influential psychoanalysts of his generation, and at this point in his career it is eminently appropriate
that he be honored with a festschrift. The influence of his many publications on psychoanalytic method and theory is evident in the frequent reference to his work by other analysts, and it is demonstrated again in this book. His personal influence, too, appears in the book, directly in Harold Blum's opening tribute and indirectly in the quality and range of individual analysts who have come together here to do him honor.
Arlow's thinking is imaginative, wide ranging and systematic. In an introductory essay, Yale Kramer reviews the organizing principles and themes of Arlow's work and successfully argues that he has transformed psychoanalytic thinking in important respects. He shows how early interests in myth and metaphor, psychopathology and its genesis, therapeutic technique, and the structural theory led to Arlow's seminal, widely quoted, 1969 papers — namely “Unconscious Fantasy and the Disturbances of Conscious Experience” and “Fantasy, Memory and Reality Testing” — that formulated the concept of unconscious fantasy as an organizing structure in the mind and an organizing construct in psychoanalytic thinking. Arlow's later views and contributions on pathogenesis and on treatment technique are organized around the concept of a hierarchy of such fantasies in each patient. An unconscious fantasy is a compromise formation best understood within the framework of the structural theory, but Kramer suggests that it is a concept that begins to transcend the structural theory.
Francis Baudry provides an equally instructive introduction to Arlow's work in the field of applied psychoanalysis, focusing primarily on two other important papers. In 1961, “Ego Psychology and the Study of Mythology” used psychoanalytic ideas on aspects of human development and adaptation common to mankind to show how a hierarchy of unconscious fan