ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The aim of the book is to continue the exploration of Freud's pre-analytic writings during the congress with a spirit of research and co-operation. The book intends to transgress the rigid barriers erected between different disciplines, schools of thought and paradigms. Instead, the book examines problems and possible solutions suggested by Sigmund Freud's pre-analytic writings with an emphasis upon the respective benefits and inevitable losses that each approach yields, rather than concerning psychoanalysts unduly with the polemics and presumptions of these approaches. The book aims at a cross-fertilisation of concepts and methods, by encouraging psychoanalysts to proliferate in entirely new fields. The book shows how conception of the unconscious in dynamic and structural terms invites the accusation of 'reductionism'. Saul Haimovich suggests that Freud's pre-analytic writings bear witness to an endeavour to combine an evolutionary conception of the psyche with a structural one.
