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though most psychoanalysts still find metapsychology or "pure" theory,
defined by Webster's as "speculation about the origins, structure and func–
tion of the mind and about the relation between the mental and the
physical, regarded as supplemental to psychology," to be differentiated from
experience-near clinical theory, enormously useful. The human mind
needs theory to organize, to validate and to keep it company. Others, like
George Klein or Roy Schafer, have advocated discarding metapsychology
as too theoretical, too abstract, too experience-distant and not needed in
addition to clinical theory. And some, like Lacan in France and Schafer in
America, following post-structuralism and deconstruction, have turned to
linguistics, each in their own way. Lacan, influential in Europe and in
American academia, assigned language the central position as the basic unit
of the mind; Schafer stressed the importance and meaning of language in
his concept of the narrative created in the analytic dialogue and in his for–
mulation of action language.
Now let me turn to the rest of psychoanalysis and briefly highlight
some of the major and significant changes and current trends and contro–
versies in psychoanalytic theory and technique since its inception, putting
them into their proper historical context: "History Then and Now."
New theories and technical innovations arose from sources within psy–
choanalysis, such as lacunae in understanding found in the old theory and
practice or new data produced in analytic work, suggesting new explana–
tions, or from outside psychoanalysis, with new knowledge gained from
related fields such as developmental child observation, studies in cognitive
and other physiologic development, or from pressure from social, eco–
nomic or philosophic changes our culture. As mentioned above, however,
the most basic concepts of the "talking cure" have remained steady in what
we define as "psychoanalysis." These include the "psychoanalytic situa–
tion" with its rules of regularity of frequence, duration of sessions,
position, verbal communication, and relative abstinence, although there
have been and still are controversies on all of these, i.e. the centrality and
intensity of frequency, position, duration, and neutrality. And it included
basic concepts such as psychic reali ty, the unconscious fantasy and motiva–
tion, psychic conflict and trauma, psychic determinism, steady functions
maintained as "psychic structure," and genetic, developmental, adaptive,
and economic or quanti tative points of view. Thus, the different psycho–
analytic theories or frames of reference, while they must have the above
concepts in common to be called "psychoanalytic," they may differ, can be
compared, contrasted, equated, overlap, and complement each other in
terms of content, such as
which
development are we concerned with,
what
is in conflict ·and
where
is the conflict cleavage line, what is the view of
reality, how is the model of the mind pictures, what is the role of object
relations, how is pathology constituted and conceived of, and what would
