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In his Freud Anniversary Lecture (1966), the late W. Hoffer made the cogent observation that the acquisition of new knowledge, or the development of new points of view, usually occurs at the cost of losing some ground previously gained. Agreeing with Hoffer, I believe that some of our basic assumptions in clinical psychoanalysis have been relegated to the background as we have focused either on advances in theory or on new areas of research. I am referring here to the integration of the theory of aggression, to the studies of ego functions and maturation, to the researches in child development, separation and individuation, primary identifications and early trauma—briefly, to all the advances in our knowledge that emphasize the first two years of life, the preoedipal period, and the prephallic phase of development.
The work of Hartmann (1964) and his collaborators (1949) on the maturational sequences of autonomous ego functions and the development of their more or less independent functioning from the drives has enriched our view of regression, as did Greenacre's description of the faulty integration of perceptual ego apparatuses with libidinal phases (1952), (1953).
Observations of the overexcitation of the aggressive drive in infancy and its deleterious influence on all libidinal phases called attention to aggressive conflicts and the defenses used against them, e.g., the substitution of sexual, i.e., perverse, solutions via regression to safeguard the object (Bak, 1956).
The emphasis on the role of pregenital factors, especially orality (Gillespie, 1940), (1952), and our increased understanding of separation-individuation processes (Mahler, 1963) may all have contributed to a shift of emphasis and to a lesser appreciation of the central