Description
Psychoanalysis, as a method of interpreting and understanding human behavior and human feeling, normal and abnormal, has been poorly understood.
Laymen and general psychiatrists alike often confuse what is basic in psychoanalysis with what is peripheral and elaborative. Many critics, in dismissing one particular psychoanalytic conceptOedipus complex, penis envy, death instinct-dismiss the entire approach as inadequate to the task of helping to explain human nature.
At the root of this misunderstanding is a vision of psychoanalysis as a set of limited, dogmatic concepts and laws that do not change or develop. Assuming this, it is easy to think that a particular explanation is “the” psychoanalytic explanation. That psychoanalysis is, on the contrary, a constantly changing, always diversified body of thought is in large part the purpose of this book.
