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Faced with the task of discussing these two wide-ranging and thought-provoking chapters by Homer C. Curtis and Michael F. Basch, I have chosen to devote myself to a forceful and detailed rejoinder to Dr. Curtis's chapter, interspersed with occasional brief remarks that only allude to the many areas of agreement between my views and those of Dr. Basch.
Despite his advocacy of balance and comprehensiveness in psychoanalytic theory, many, if not most, of Curtis's objections to self psychology seem rooted in his uncritical adherence to the doctrine of instinctual drive. By repeatedly writing of “the drives” as if this phrase referred to demonstrated empirical facts whose existential reality no card-carrying Freudian psychoanalyst would ever call into question, he rests his case against self psychology on a singularly shaky scientific foundation. Paradoxically, it was never Kohut's intent to do away with drives and, indeed, traces of the drive concept can be found in both of his last two books (1977, 1984). However, thorough and systematic critiques of Freudian drive theory have been undertaken by numerous others (e.g., Gill, 1976; Holt, 1976; Klein, 1976; Kubie, 1975; Peterfreund, 1971; Rubinstein, 1967; Schafer, 1976) and, like Dr. Basch, I believe that the conclusions to be drawn from such studies are definitive. By listening to patients tell him about their experiences, Freud discovered—and it was a monumental discovery, still valid today—that symbolically encoded unconscious meanings play a central role in pathogenesis and in human psychological life generally. The theory of instinctual drive, by contrast, derived not from Freud's psychoanalytic work but from his attempt to graft his crucial clinical insights onto the Procrustean