ABSTRACT
An examination of classical psychoanalytic theory, as represented by such investigators as S. Freud, E. Jones, and H. Hartmann, among many others, shows it to be a highly complex structure. For classical theory is best viewed as incorporating five interrelated approaches to personality study, or five dimensions of theory: the genetic, the structural, the topographic, the economic, and instinct theory. Instinct theory is concerned with the ultimate underlying dynamics of personality functioning. Many of the hypotheses of psychoanalysis are certainly relevant and testable, even outside the clinical situation in which they originated and to which they are particularly appropriate. In Freud’s writings, for instance, anxiety in the oedipal situation is regarded as in part dependent on anxiety related to the birth situation as “prototypical”; and, furthermore, individual repression is considered as partly dependent on a phylogenetic base, which may also be taken as “prototypical.”
