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In psychoanalysis, conceptual issues and political differences have always intersected and overlapped. The theoretical and organizational conflicts that swirled around Freud and his followers are well documented, as are those involving various schools of thought since that time. The contemporary crisis in our field also contains intersecting themes of knowledge and power: As we struggle to retain a measure of professional and academic influence, we grapple with dilemmas of definition and theory that directly affect our abilities to help our patients as well as society's (and our own) beliefs about the legitimacy and value of our work. The effort to “prove”analysis valid, to others and to ourselves, is a recurring theme, even though research and theorizing done in the service of such a goal are inevitably handicapped. And there are many more subtle conflicts of interest which burden our individual and collective searches for knowledge: Transferences to our analysts and teachers; loyalties to schools and groups; and the exquisitely personal, ambiguous and highly-charged nature of psychoanalytic practice which make it an especially receptive screen for transferences — our patients' and our own.
In the face of these stresses, some of us turn almost religiously to our concepts as sources of authority and badges of correctness (Levine, 1993; Curtis, 1992), while others divorce theory from practice — by publicly espousing conceptual orthodoxy, but in the actual consulting room tending to ignore or modify technical principles which they believe to be wrong, outdated, or even incomprehensible. Against this background, and because of it, Gail Reed has undertaken this study of one of the field's most important concepts, one that is frequently cited as the hallmark of a true analytic process — yet which, at the same time, many of us have privately suspected is poorly understood, hard to identify, and lacking in firm consensual meaning: i.e., the transference neurosis. Observing