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Since Leo Rangell entered the field of psychoanalysis six decades ago, he has written six books and more than 450 articles. The Road to Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory is published only three years after his last book, My Life in Theory. This latter ranged widely over many aspects of the scientific and organizational life of psychoanalysis. The new book has a much narrower focus: the developing psychoanalytic theory of mind, and Rangell's plea for the acceptance of what he calls “total composite theory” as the preferred theoretical model for psychoanalysis.
In a paper published in 1999, “A.A. Brill and the Politics of Exclusion,” I outlined four approaches to a psychoanalytic metatheory, or theory about theories: the drive theory; the relational theory of Mitchell and Greenberg; the four psychologies theory of Fred Pine; and the accumulative theory, advanced in Robert Wallerstein's notion of common ground and by Rangell in his total composite theory. I wrote in that paper that “Rangell's forthright defense of classical principles” was “closest to my own,” and I still hold to that point of view eight years later, even though I value psychoanalytic ecumenicism and have organized many conferences in order to give contributors of different persuasions a platform to present their views.
Rangell's position is that the new “alternative” schools—object relations, self psychology, intersubjectivity; interpersonal psychoanalysis, relational psychoanalysis; Kleinian, Kohutian, Stolorovian psychoanalysis