ABSTRACT
As a hermeneutic science, psychoanalysis is not all of psychology. I dealt earlier with the effort within so~called ego psychology to make psychoanalysis a general psychology; this effort, I submit, was ill fated. Edelson (1988) has argued that there are psychological functions, like memory and perception, that are-contra Hartmann's autonomous apparatus-not within the domain of psychoanalysis. Such functions can be influenced by wishes, values, and the like and then become of interest to psychoanalysis, but the functions themselves in their somatic structure are not. The deterioration of memory with aging, for example, is not a matter for psychoanalytic study except insofar as the individual reacts to such deterioration in terms of an idiosyncratic way grounded in his personality. Once again, we arrive at the distinction between biology and psychology.
