Conceptual Issues in Psychoanalysis

Reviews / Votes

"Laced with priceless personal detail and a humanistic appreciation of the makers of theory and their motives, Gedo transforms an erudite discussion of principles into a gripping adventure story."

- Lawrence Friedman, M.D., Weill Cornell Medical College "This is a unique guide-book to a controversy that absorbs all clinicians. In a masteful overview of psychoanalytic history, Gedo deftly portrays landmark efforts to take account of the adult impact of preverbal forms. He shows how those efforts were inspired but also limited by the clinical evidence then available, requiring mediation by philosophically sophisticated theorists, while that evidence is now richly supplemented by infant research. Gedo warns about faulty approaches to infant observations, and suggests how, properly used, it makes otherwise unreachable problems accessible to treatment. As a pioneer clinician and theorist, Gedo is himself a central figure in this historic pageant, and because he holds back neither passion nor artistry, his account has the insider's special clarity about what it at stake. Laced with priceless personal detail and a humanistic appreciation of the masters of theory and their motives, Gedo transforms an erudite discussion of principles into a gripping adventure story."

- Lawrence Friedman, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College

"Gedo writes with rare erudition, lively imagination, and a passionate devotion to the fit of his ideas and deeds one with the other and with those of others. He deserves recognition as analyst, humanist, scientist, philosopher, moralist, illuminist, raconteur, and fire setter. If you like Freud, Erasmus, early Emerson, Thoreau, and maybe Mencken, try Gedo."

- M. Robert Gardner, author, On Trying to Teach (Analytic Press, 1997)