that are constandy changing. It calls for a dialectical relationship to earlier theoretical views and conceptions rather than a mechanical repetition of Freud’s dated thoughts. The series affirms the fact that contributions to and about psychoanalysis have come from many directions. It is designed as a forum for the multidisciplinary studies that intersect with psychoanalytic thought but without the requirement that psychoanalysis necessarily be the starting point or, indeed, the center focus. The criteria for inclusion in the series are that the work be significantly informed by psychoanalytic thought or that it be aimed at furthering our understanding of psychoanalysis in its broadest meaning as theory, practice, and sociocultural phenomenon; that it be of current topical interest and that it provide the critical reader with contemporary insights; and, above all, that it be high-quality scholarship, free of absolute dogma, banalization, and empty jargon. The author’s professional identity and particular theoretical orientation matter only to the extent that such facts may serve to frame the work for the reader, alerting him or her to inevitable biases of the author.
The Psychoanalytic Crosscurrents series presents an array of works from the multidisciplinary domain in an attempt to capture the ferment of scholarly activities at the core as well as at the boundaries of psychoanalysis. The books and monographs are from a variety of sources: authors will be psychoanalysts—traditional, neo- and post-Freudian, existential, object relational, Kohutian, Lacanian, etc.—social scientists with quantitative or qualitative orientations to psychoanalytic data, and scholars from the vast diversity of approaches and interests that make up the humanities. The series entertains works on critical comparisons of psychoanalytic theories and concepts as well as philosophical examinations of fundamental assumptions and epistemic claims that furnish the base for psychoanalytic hypotheses. It includes studies of psychoanalysis as literature (discourse and narrative theory) as well as the application of psychoanalytic studies of creativity and the arts. Works in the cognitive and neurosciences will be included to the extent that they address some fundamental psychoanalytic tenet, such as the role of dreaming and other forms of unconscious mental processes.
It should be obvious that an exhaustive enumeration of the types of works that might fit into the Psychoanalytic Crosscurrents series is pointless. The studies comprise a lively and growing literature as a unique domain; books of this sort are frequently difficult to classify or catalog. Suffice it to say that the overriding aim of the editor of this series is to serve as a conduit for the identification of the outstanding yield of that emergent literature and to foster its further unhampered growth.
LEO GOLDBERGER
New York University
Preface
Nothing persuades us more fully of the vitality of psychoanalysis as a supreme intellectual achievement than the fresh insights into Freud’s writings gained by successive generations of students. In them Freud offered far more than he could himself have been aware of. In this way he resembles, for example, Shakespeare and Goethe. For all the massive changes in life and culture that have taken place over the centuries—and perhaps especially during the dark century that has passed since Freud began to write—these writers appear to have anticipated the questions we moderns have to put to them. They speak out of a timeless wisdom, cast in the language of particular times and places, from which new epochs derive nourishment and inspiration. In large measure their greatness resides in their perpetual novelty.
Freud differs from other creative geniuses in a respect we should never lose sight of: he was not only a literary and philosophic creator, but also the founder and chief exponent of a therapeutic method, a method of caring for troubled humans through understanding, with the intention of the alleviation of suffering. As we see in Michael Thompson’s exposition, it is necessary to be very clear to what extent this kind of therapy is analogous to medical care, and to what extent the psychoanalyst must depart from his or her disposition to think medically, for the very purpose of offering help. A similar distinction, to which Thompson has also devoted his thinking, rests in the question whether psychoanalysis is a science. Were it not for the prevailing dogma that equates scientific truth with objective validation, this would not be a question worth pursuing. However, in the constant state of attack by the uncomprehending that has been the fate of psychoanalysis since its inception, such questions and distinctions need to be faced again and again.
It is here that Thompson’s understanding of Freud brings to light Freud’s own largely implicit replies. We are shown how Freud, ever the biological scientist attempting to look to his patients for substantiation of hypotheses established on biological models, was simultaneously engaged in the pursuit of the inner personal truth that defies objectification. For example, he came to recognize the phenomenon of transference—which is the foundation of all modern psychoanalytic theory and therapy, and to which Thompson directs our attention extensively—in the unexpected ways in which patients entered into their converse with him. In the cliche of our own day, the analyst becomes “a part of the problem,” and the interaction and dialogue between analyst and patient become the arena in which the hidden truths of the patient’s soul are disclosed. This lived transference cannot be grasped in the language of impersonal causality.
Unburdened by the requirement to make psychoanalysis sound like traditional science, Thompson reads Freud in the light of a philosophy of existence that was alive in Freud’s time, but out of direct contact with his thought or that of his followers. Indeed, as we have been taught, Freud rather disdained philosophy, although with bursts of admiration for a few philosophers. Like many natural scientists, he did not usually consider that scientific method itself was grounded in philosophic proportions. The philosophy of existence, of being, found its most eloquent voice in Martin Heidegger. Thompson’s subtitle, “The Encounter with the Real,” summarizes an important aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy in a nutshell, but fortunately Thompson does not leave us modestly equipped, and he expounds it in relevant detail. I must parenthetically remind those who would write off anything connected with Heidegger—Hitler’s unrepentant if ambivalent follower—that the fundamental principles of the philosophy of existence were developed independently by among others Karl Jaspers, a man of uncompromised character, although not nearly as exciting a writer.
Heidegger’s influence on psychoanalysis appeared in the important work of Jacques Lacan, and Thompson is also indebted to that eccentric innovator, as he has shown more fully in his earlier book The Death of Desire. Lacan too took exception early in his career to the aspirations of psychoanalysts towards affiliation with biological science. One may also see in Lacan’s therapeutic approaches, including his highly controversial sessions of variable length, ways of putting into practice the idea of psychoanalysis as a human encounter in pursuit of “the real.” The ultimate blunder of organized psychoanalysis in its quest for purity of doctrine occurred in 1963, when the International Psychoanalytical Association pronounced its anathema on Lacan—admittedly not without provocation—thereby helping to sequestrate his school into a cult barely tangential to the mainstream. Happily, Thompson has not followed Lacan in employing mystification as a presumed way of exposing the mysteries of the unconscious; he presents his insights in an exceptionally lively and accessible language.
Thompson persistently questions the technological stratification that has in too many hands deadened psychoanalytic theory and practice since Freud. Freud’s own disposition toward systematizing was there all the time, but it was literally concretized in the English translation, the Standard Edition of his works, as Darius Ornston and others have amply demonstrated. Thompson does not offer a new language or a new all-encompassing system as a substitute. He does not dispute essential Freudian theory of the unconscious. Rather the other side of Freud comes into focus here: the side that was implied from the start in Freud’s greatest technical invention, the fundamental rule of free association. If the rest of Freud’s teachings were lost through some misguided censorship of psychoanalytic instruction, we could still reconstruct all that we needed for a great rediscovery, so long as we were permitted to listen to the unguarded discourses of our patients, and to respond to them out of the parallel mental processes of our
