Following on two decades of longitudinal direct observation of young children, revisions of two component parts of psychosexual theory seem warranted. First, direct observation does not support the concept of a "phallic" phase as being representative of the girl's first genital phase. Observational findings challenge "phallic" concept-dependent hypotheses Freud proposed in 1925, including how the girl enters her Oedipus complex as well as the nature of her wish to have a baby. In the children observed by the author, phallic aggression was not manifest as much in girls as in boys, between the ages of two and four. Second, it is proposed we put aside the "phallic" phase concept in our considerations of the girl's dynamics and that we heighten our awareness of her early experiences of ambivalence--which lie at the heart of the oedipal conflict--and which leads to a formulation of superego development in the girl more compatible with clinical findings.

The paper advances the view that Freud's main legacy will be the application of psychoanalysis to community and social problems and issues, rather than in contributions to the treatment of mental illness. The history of applied psychoanalysis is outlined with suggestions for the training and validation of Community Psychoanalysis as a discrete field. How Community Psychoanalysis differs from Clinical Psychoanalysis is reviewed.The paper finishes with a sketch of typical modern applications to rearing of children and prevention of emotional disorders in children, contributions to understanding large social groups including racial and ethnic strife, school violence, terrorism, prejudice and conflict.One might term the 21st century, the century of the social brain, an opportunity for rapprochement with the neurosciences. It is unfortunate that the later part of the last century involved a great deal of Freud bashing, spearheaded by E. Fuller Torrey, philosophers such as Crews and Grunbaum, and a vast array of hangers-on guided by personal and job related territorial battles with psychoanalysis, especially in academia. Freud seems to have been a necessary scapegoat for the relative ineffectiveness of psychiatric care in the United States, which for several decades had been dominated by psychoanalytic thought constrained by physician domination of psychoanalysis. Freud might well have been troubled by the way his ideas were employed toward personal and political ends rather than the quest for knowledge and the improvement of the lot of the human race, as always had been Freud's somewhat idealistic aim. America was known to not be one of his favorite countries in spite of a wider acceptance of his ideas here than anywhere else. He no doubt would have embraced the neurosciences, given his conviction that psychoanalytic theorizing would one day be confirmed by neuro-scientific findings.He was a scientist and a far-seeing visionary. Although it seems he disliked philosophy, he created modes of thought with rules and laws that suggested a philosophy of mind; he coined the term "metapsychology," modeled on the term "metaphysics," his look at philosophy. Clearly, he created his own language and paradigms to approach knowledge (note that the idea of overdetermination is an original contribution to the philosophy of logic), to create a general psychology.Examining his legacy 150 years after his birth, one tends to look at evidence of his contributions to the treatment of the mentally ill. Rather, we are going to look at some implications of Freud's work for the future of psychoanalysis, and for what we know to be exciting new directions.Freud was born the year Darwin published The Origin of the Species; he grew up in one of the most exciting times in human history, when the basis of modern science was being laid down by early psychophysicalists like Helmholtz, Billroth, and Brucke (Sulloway, 1979).Freud was a generalist in the best sense of the word, taking many years longer than necessary to get through medical school; he see...

In this study, attention is drawn first to the fact that, in the complex fabric of development woven by the mutual interactions of ego, id, evolving self, object relations, and life experiences, this study looks only at the interactions of instinctual drives and symbiosis/separation-individuation. The instinctual drives are powerful psychobiological motivating forces, whereas symbiosis/separation-individuation is a developmental process that unfolds during the first three years of life. I have suggested that an upsurge in aggression thrusts the symbiotic-phase child into the separation-individuation phase and process. Material from longitudinal direct observations of two of our project children is presented to document this hypothesis. I have further proposed that, given normal enough developmental conditions, biologically pre-determined differentiations in the instinctual drives trigger the various phases and subphases of symbiosis and separation-individuation during the first three years of life.

I have entitled chapter 1 of War is Not Inevitable, "The problem with Freud's answer to Einstein's question, 'Why War': it was wrong". Let me here start by saying again that Freud supports his speculative answer with an inversion of the "cause à effect" principle, proposing that"…the countless cruelties in history and in our everyday lives vouch [i.e. document that] a death instinct". To date, no study findings, clinical, empirical, or bio-medical have proven that a death instinct is the cause for our

In this essay the author draws attention to an insuffi

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