Book Review: From Classical to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: A Critique and Integration

Abstract

In the final ten pages of Mitchell and Greenberg's Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (1983), in a section titled "The Models: A Deeper Divergence," we are informed that the drive/structural model is felt to be "incommensurable" (p. 404) with the relational/structural model. On philosophical as well as psychological grounds, this "deeper divergence" reveals two incompatible visions of life. Can these divergent views coexist? Can an analyst shift between several theoretical frames or, due to philosophical incompatibilities, must he stay true to a single theory? It is to this thorny comparative psychoanalysis problem that Morris Eagle is lending his hand. Unlike his predecessors, however, who organized their study genealogically (historically, biographically), Eagle opts for a conceptual approach: seminal authors are organized within sections dedicated to five core concepts: theories of mind, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment, this last divided into (1) treatment goals and analytic stance and (2) therapeutic actions and ingredients. The advantage of this approach is that the ideas of major theorists are