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In Beyond Freud, Joseph Reppen has brought together the ideas of 14 modern analytic theorists as represented by well-qualified authors. “Each theorist provides a unique vision of contemporary psychoanalysis that should endure for some time” (p. viii). This is a major claim, and it seems not unreasonable to look at those theorists who, while informed by Freud, presumably have gone beyond him.
What does it mean to have gone beyond Freud? Gardner Lindzey (1967) maintained that “almost all that is most central and vital in classical psychoanalytic theory is related to the incest taboo and its consequences for psychological development” (1057). Lindzey goes on to conclude that in the very process of making psychoanalytic theory more acceptable and congruent with general psychology (he names Hartmann, Kris, Erikson, and Rapaport) the potent and distinctive features of the theory will be minimized or eliminated. Thus Lindzey articulates a central danger of “going beyond Freud.”
Perhaps reasonable criteria with which to assess the theorists represented in this book might be taken from Freud's own writings. In 1923 Freud wrote, “The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus Complex —these constitute the principal subject-matter of psychoanalysis and the foundations of its theory. No one who cannot accept them all should count himself a psychoanalyst” (247). In 1925 Freud reiterated these elements: “The theories of repression and of the unconscious, of the aetiological significance of sexual life and of the importance of infantile experiences — these form the principal constituents of the theoretical structure of psychoanalysis” (40).
There is much room for modern theorists to differ substantially from certain aspects of Freud's thinking (e.g., psychosexual stages, metapsychol-ogy, death instinct) and still be within the Freudian frame of refer