Description: Each author examines Freud's paper through a personal lens that is coloured by the psychoanalytic culture from which he or she comes. In each instance, the writers' chapters demonstrate the heuristic value of Two Principles for twenty-first century psychoanalytic theory and technique.
Review Quotes: "It is comforting to realise that a paper written more than a century ago can still elicit new thinking. That psychoanalysts can still find matter for discussion, but also, and perhaps more importantly, for elaboration from a rather short paper by Freud is testimony to the richness of the heritage left by the Viennese. In this book, one will find original clinical and theoretical reflection from a variety of standpoints, all in a dialogue or sometimes a controversy with Freud. Many of the authors have chosen to stand on the shoulders of Bion; others took a more direct route. All, I believe, point to the fact that the metapsychological conception, so well illustrated by Freud's Formulations, is irreplaceable for understanding what psychoanalysts encounter in their practice and what they can do about it. Modern formulations are at variance from those expounded by Freud in 1911, as Freud himself also was later in his life; they are also at variance with one another. All had nevertheless to come to terms, time and again, with the clear and provocative, but always seminal thinking that went into the original formulations of 1911, no less than before or after."--Dominique Scarfone, MD, Full Professor, Université de Montreal; Training and Supervising Analyst, Institut Psychanalytique de Montréal (Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and Institute)