Psychoanalysis—the Major Concepts

Abstract

BURNESS E. MOORE AND BERNARD D. FINE, EDS. Psychoanalysis-the Major Concepts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 577 pp., $60.00, ISBN 0-300-06329-6. This book, in painfully small print for aging eyes, essentially constitutes the Summa Psychoanalytica of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 1990, the editors published the third edition of their Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, an outstanding collection of important definitions. The book under review here is a sequel, consisting essentially of a series of essays on innumerable clinical and abstract topics. The authors are prominent members of the American Psychoanalytic Association and, although the editors claim that the book is published independently of that organization, represents a thorough coverage of the traditional United States views on the practice and theory of that would be endorsed by that organization. The essays range widely in style, from those exceptionally clearly written, as for example by Pulver, and as such with special value for beginners, to those that are exceedingly scholastic in the high medieval sense, such as the chapter on narcissism by Moore (one of the editors of the volume) or on self by Vann Spruiell. Some of the chapters, for example those by McLaughlin on resistance and by Renik and Grossman on working with are of great technical value and go into considerable detail. The book is divided into two main parts: clinical and theoretical concepts. The section on clinical contains essays on therapeutic applications, technical issues, and other clinical phenomena such as dreams, character, somatization, narcissism, and sadomasochism. The section on theoretical concepts covers factors affecting normality and pathology, instinct theory, sexuality, affects, development, self, objects, identification, conflict, defense, structural theory, metapsychology, and finishes with essays on psychoanalytic education and research. Thus all conceivable aspects of the major concepts of are covered by these essays. The authors are very conservative and seem to agree with each other on most major issues. For example, Pulver maintains that five sessions per week are desirable and four the minimum number to constitute a psychoanalysis (p. 8). His opening chapter is the only one specifically addressed to the beginner, and in he states that Eissler's concept of is now passe (p. 22). This issue of parameters seems to haunt some of the authors; for example, Seelig, in an attempt to differentiate individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy from psychoanalysis, states that it is useful to think of the psychotherapy as being the first stage of an analysis, essentially a parameter of technique that must be employed in the initial period of the work but which can be analyzed later (p. 54). Her chapter deals with one of the most controversial topics in the book, and I suspect every reader will take issue with some of the statements to be found there. Also on this conservative line, Pulver opposes the constructivists without giving details of their radical point of view in his chapter on analytic processes and mechanisms of change. …