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PARTISAN REVIEW
sis as a profession, as they have affected medicine in general. The
main question is whether psychoanalysis will be able to meet the
challenges imposed by these developments. Judging from the recent,
rich contributions concerning the nature and the treatment of
narcissistic character disorders, borderline states and perversions, one
may conclude that the challenge has been accepted and dealt with
constructively.
Now for the final question, the ideological one. Proponents of
various ideologies have attempted to wed their principles to psycho–
analysis. These marriages have hardly ever turned out to be happy
ones. Revolutionary thinkers and conservatives, religious believers
and atheists, at different times, have all perceived their principles to
be in harmony or congruent with the findings of psychoanalysis, and
they have tried to use psychoanalytic insights to validate their
ideology and to extend its influence. Psychoanalysis, in fact, does not
project any specific world outlook of its own. Freud explicitly
asserted this position and maintained it, for all of his penchant
to
philosophize. Psychoanalysis is a science of human thought and
behavior derived from the natural sciences, biology and the social
sciences. There are, to be sure, certain values implicit in the princi–
ples of psychoanalytic technique. These involve respect for the
integrity and individuality of each patient. Since the psychoanalytic
situation requires complete candor and honesty, and the patient is
expected to say freely whatever comes to his mind, psychoanalytic
therapy in a real sense becomes possible only in a free democratic
society where the rights of the individual are guaranteed and where
the indi vidual can feel reasonably secure from persecution because of
his ideas.
The essential contribution psychoanalysis has to make regard–
ing the understanding of human nature is based upon a unique
method of investigation governed by standard conditions. There are
many levels of encounter in the total analytic experience. Closest to
the fundamental data is the level of clinical observation. At an
increasing distance from this confrontation with the data are the
levels of clinical interpretation, generalization, and clinical theory.
Up to this point of conceptualization, psychoanalysis deals with
extrapolations, inferences and generalizations from clinical observa–
tion. Beyond this level is the level of metapsychology, a body of
theoretical speculation and paradigm not directly inferable from the
data, but based on models borrowed in a metaphorical spirit from
other frames of reference. Quite independent of all the foregoing, as
Waelder pointed out, is the encounter with Freud's personal philoso-
