ABSTRACT
One of the clearest lessons to be gleaned from the enormous body of Freud scholarship, which has become a field of intellectual history in its own right, is that major theoreticians can be read in many, many different ways. A second lesson is that it is probably a mistake to expect any great innovator to really grasp the revolution in which he or she is participating. Because they are standing in one worldview and struggling to give birth to another, they cannot possibly envision the full fruition of their efforts. Thus, Loewald (1980), Habermas (1968), and Lear (1990), each in his own way, argue that Freud only incompletely understood the revolution he himself was effecting. Ogden (1989) has argued that it is not only impossible to understand Melanie Klein’s work without having read Freud, but that it is impossible to understand Freud without having first read Klein, because the work of Klein and others brought to life potentials that were only germinal in Freud’s writings.
