810 BOOK SECTION

affirmed his own lack as well as his mother’s, he could pursue other
objects as a subject of his own desire, rather than simply function as
an object in his parents’ desires.
By emphasizing the symbolic structuring of experience in the
oedipal resolution, Lacan is affirming Freud’s view of it as the corner-
stone of acculturation whereby the child is inaugurated into the
larger, pluralistic society in which his place is clearly marked by kin-
ship nominations that specify incest taboos. The central point in all
this is the mediating and structuring role of language, limited by the
real and fleshed out by the imaginary. For Lacan, the decisive analytic
events occur not in the imaginary register in which the patient’s ego
becomes identified with the analyst’s ego, but in the symbolic register,
in which such mirroring identifications must be relativized and con-
textualized far termination to be successful.

REFERENCES

BRUNER, J. & HASTE, H., Eds. (1987). hlaking Sense: The Child’s Construction of
the World. New York: hfethuen.
FINZI.S. (1989). Knowledge and penetration. In Hermann’s Place in Contempo-
rury Psjchounat’p2 Theory (Conference on the Centennial of Imre Her-
rnann’s Birth, November 1 1-12). Budapest: Hungarian Psychoanalytic
Society, pp. 20-24.

John P. Muller, Ph.D.

Lemont, Illinois

PSYCHOANALYSIS:A THEORY IN CRISIS.By Marshall Edelson. Chicago:

Univ. Chicago Press, 1988, 392 pp., $39.95.

There is a widespread perception that psychoanalysis, at least in

America, is in serious crisis. The declared dimensions are multiple:
As a psychology purporting to explain how the mind hangs together,
it is in retreat from its most overarching claims, and it is beset by
alternative psychological explanatory visions, most notably the behav-
ioristic and the humanistic or phenomenological-existential.As a ther-
apy for the mentally and emotionally disordered, its results are more
modest than a once ebullient overoptimism had it, and it is competing
with a myriad other claimants, serious therapies derived from the
competing psychological paradigms, fringe therapies ranging all the
way to the cultist and exploitative, and varieties of self-help efforts

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 BOOK REVIEWS 81 1
for almost every category Of illness or disorder. And as a scientific
enterprise its credentials have been under increasing attack from phi-
losophy of science critics both without .and within, ranging from the
logical positivist position that has declared that psychoanalyticinquiry
has failed to conform to the most basic tenets of the scientificmethod,
to the opposite, hermeneutic, position that psychoanalysis should
abandon its pretensions as a science and acknowledge that it is only
an interpretive discipline that assigns meanings and creates coherent
stories about lives, but all of it outside the domains of causality and
verification.
How different all this is from the intellectual ascendancy that
psychoanalysis seemed to have achieved by the time of Freud’s death,
just short of a half-century ago, as expressed in the celebratory state-
ment by the poet W. H. Auden in eulogy to Freud, “To us he is no
more a person, Now but a whole climate of opinion.” And how differ-
ent from the situation in much of the rest of the world today, espe-
cially in Europe and in Latin America, where psychoanalysis, on a
different historical trajectory than in the United States, is currently a
major growth industry-in such major nations as France and Ger-
many and Italy and Argentina and Brazil-and where the happenings
in psychoanalysis are fiercely debated in all the organs of intellectual
and cultural expression, in academia, in the press, and in the other
media.
It is in this turbulent arena of concern with the nature of psycho-
analysis and its credibility as a science that can offer understanding
and help to people in mental and emotional distress, that Edelson, a
philosophically and scientifically interested psychoanalyst theoretician
has been a major player over recent years. This present book is a
summation of his progressively crystallized position on the major
questions that he addresses within this domain of inquiry, and of his
varyingly controversial answers. The fundamental questions ad-
dressed by this book are: What is the domain of psychoanalysis as a
psychology, and what is its core theory? What is the nature of science
and its method? Can the canons and method of science be appropri-
ately applied to the data generated by the psychoanalytic case study?
Can the case study method be used not only to generate fruitful
hypotheses about human mental states, but also to critically test their
claims to truths about the functioning of our minds and their efficacy
in ameliorating the disorders of our minds?
Edelson does build a most impressive argument, though few psy-
choanalysts will agree equally with his every point. On the question
of the nature of psychoanalysis as a psychology. Edelson is in keeping

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812 BOOK SECTION

with the current general circumscription of the psychoanalytic do-

main. N o more is it claimed that psychoanalysis can be a truly general
psychology encompassing all the phenomena of mental functioning
within its purview. IVe are almost all content today with the more
delimited domain staked out in E. Kris’s aphoristic statement that
psychoanalysis is nothing but human behavior considered from the
point of view of inner conflict, i.e., those aspects of our functioning
based on our varying adaptations to (unconscious) conflict. That is,
in truth, an ample domain; Edelson, however, circuniscribes it even
more sharply. He states it to be concerned only with problem solving
in the world of imagination. He seems to exclude mental states that
link to environmental pressures and lead to actions in relation to
reality. Since our imaginations-our symbolic rcprcsentations-color
o u r whole perception of the reality “out there,” it is hard to sustain
the view that our actions in respect to that reality are not also illumi-
nated by our psychoanalytic focus on the inner conflicts that inevitably
influence those actions.
Edelson parts company even more with most analysts in his insis-
tence that the essential core of analytic theory is the driving force of
o u r sexual impulses expressed via our unconscious fantasies as they
try to work out maximal gratifications in the face of reality obstacles
and moral.dangers. This is indeed vintage Freud, but it ignores, for
example, the whole profound shift in psychoanalysis worldwide, and
now, even belatedly in America, toivard an equal positioning of the
so-called “object relations” perspective, the focus away from the pri-
macy of instinctual drive toivard the at least equal valence of relation-
ship-seeking as the central motivational levers of mental functioning.
But all this one can say has to do with niceties of technical views, of
concern only within the psychoanalytic community.
On the issue of the nature of science, Edelson restates what every
thoughtful scientist, and certainly every philosopher of science, knows
and avows, though it is not always understood by the wider world
outside the scientific community. That is that science is not marked
by its subject matter or its content, but by its method. T h e subject of
science can be the natural universe (the material world) o r it can be the
inner psychological world of the mind. It can be a study of objectively
discernible and measurable phenomena (physics and biology) o r of
the subjective and value-laden (mental states and cultural institutions).
It can study what is rational and what is irrational. What makes any
such study scientific-and not humanistic, for example-is the
method. Science applies rational metiiods-the “scientific method”-to
determine, by suitable test, control, o r juxtaposition of observations,

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 BOOK KEVIEIVS 813
whether the hypotheses arrived at to help explain its observational
data and to render them more comprehensible (and perhaps control-
lable) are provisionally more credible thin are any known rival ex-
planatory hypothcscs. And Edelson strongly reminds us that, human
ingenuity being what it is, there are always rival hypotheses to be
endlessly tested against the favored ones, in the forever refinement
and advance of our knowledge in any domain of science.
And here we come to the heart of Edelson’s book, the “crisis” in
the theory of psychoanalysis that is his central concern. Edelson be-
lieves firmly that psychoanalysis does-or at least can, and must -
meet the criteria for a scientific discipline that have just been stated.
It is currently under severe attack on this issue, and from two opposed
positions. On the one side are those representing the scientific per-
spective, of ivhom H. Grunbaum, the philosopher of science, is the
current most vigorous and articulate advocate. These critics contend
that psychoanalysis purports to, but fails to live up to the proper
canons of science, and furthermore cannot do so. Grunbaum argues
that the data of the psychoanalytic consulting room, though very
useful in generating hypotheses, cannot, because they are so hope-
lessly “contaminated” (by the power of suggestion, for example), be
used to properly test those hypotheses. Proper scientific testing of
psychoanalytic hypotheses can only take place, according to his view,
in extraclinical settings, large-scale experimental or epidemiological,
and this has never been done to any significant degree and would
itself be fraught with enormous complexity and difficulty.
The opposed, so-called hermeneutic perspective acknowledges
Grunbaum’s contention that psychoanalysis is not a scientifically testa-
ble enterprise, but says that it is no matter. Psychoanalysis is declared
to be an interpretive discipline, like literary criticism, and not a scien-
tific enterprise at all. It is a search for the ascription of meanings,
meanings that analyst and analysand come to agree upon as making
a coherent story out of a life, rather than a search for causes and
effects, causes that eventuate in neuroses that can be undone by un-
raveling their origins. In effect, the issue of science is given up by
default.
This is the fray to which Edelson has committed himself with
gusto, persistence, and intelligence. The heart of this book is his spir-
ited defense of psychoanalysis as science, not necessarily as it is, but
as it can be in the best of hands, and as it should be. He mounts an
impressive argument, contra Grunbaum and his supporters, that the
data of the psychoanalytic consulting room as described in the clinical
case report can be, though in most instances they are not, studied and

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8 14 BOOK SECTION

presented in such a way that the scientificcredibility of the conjectures

and of the cuusul cluiins can be tested-and either strengthened or
weakened--.is-&--.is rival causal conjectures, such as, for example, that
the claimed effects are due to suggestive influences, to take one widely
touted view. Edelson illustrates in detail the many ways in which psy-
choanalytic propositions can be and should be studied to bring them
within the scope of properly scientific scrutiny so that truly individual
treatments and properly scientific advance can proceed hand in hand.
This is what Freud always dreamed, and to the best of his abilities
carried out, given the state of scientific sophistication of his day.
Edelson’s overall case, argued so passionately, is indeed impres-
sive and persuasive, certainly to me, but I have been lined up on
the same side of this argument for a long time. It is a defense of
psychoanalysis as a science that I certainly hope can resonate strongly
in psychoanalytic ranks and enhearten all of us who have dedicated
significant parts of our careers to psychoanalytic research. It is also a
message that I hope will receive a warm reception in that wider intel-
lectual world where ideas matter and where enlightened social policy
and cultural cachet are fostered. I find it too bad that the argumenta-
tion (and the language) of this book is at times so turgid as well as
technical that it becomes relatively inaccessible to all but those who
are, to begin’with, immersed in it, philosophically interested psycho-
analysts and philosophers of science. The message of the book, that
the intellectual “crisis” in psychoanalysis can be surmounted to the
enrichment of psychoanalysis, and of its expanded capacity to help
people, surely deserves the widest possible audience.

Robert S. Wallerstein, h1.D.

San Francisco, California

ATTITUDESOF ENTITLEhIENT THEORETICAL AND CLINICAL ISSUES. Ed-

ited by Vuinik D. Volkan and Terry C.Rodgers. Charlottesville, Va.:
Univ. Virginia Press, 1988, xi + 106 pp., $19.95.

This is the first in a projected series of publications by the Virginia

Psychoanalytic Society. The series are to provide “ ...a window be-
tween clinical (medical) issues on the one hand and general human
issues such as psychological, social, legal questions or as an aesthetics
and literature on the other hand.” This first book is dedicated to
George Kriegman (1917-1982) as the founding father of psychoanal-
ysis in Virginia. Appropriately, the first chapter presents Kriegman’s

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