ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses two issues: one, “progress in psychoanalysis”; and two, “envisioning the future of the profession.” It focuses on S. Freud’s conviction that psychoanalysis’s claim on posterity lay, in large part, in its theory of the nature of mind rather than as a form of clinical treatment. Quite disturbingly, there appears to be little or no change in the practices and attitudes of the psychoanalytic community more than 60 years after E. Glover’s comments were made. It could be argued that pluralism represents progress in the sense that it reflects an understandable reaction against an authoritarian hegemony that characterized the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and the psychoanalytic institutes under its aegis for many years. One potentially productive way of looking at different psychoanalytic “schools” is through an effort to understand the problems each “school” is trying to solve, including the errors they are attempting to correct and the aspects of mental life they intend to account.
