**1. Introduction**

If the proverbial alien landed on earth today, it would not recognize psychoanalysis as a singular discipline. Not only do multiple approaches to clinical practice cluster under this rubric, but the discipline embraces sharply divergent assumptions about the fundamentals of the human condition. To give just a single example, there are practitioners who labor clinically on the assumption that we are born with rapaciously envious and destructive motives that cause us, even as infants, to aggress against the nurture provided by caretakers. By contrast, there are practitioners who conduct their therapeutic mission on the assumption that babies are born pristinely innocent, taking their place 'center stage' in their relational world, and only coming into difficulties when caretaking fails them.

In short, even though psychoanalysts generally have international allegiances to one or another of only three professional organizations, within these arenas (and notably within the largest of them, the International Psychoanalytic Association, which was founded by Sigmund Freud himself) the discipline splinters into a multitude of practices and modes of fundamentally divergent theorization. In this context, new and not-so-new models of our psychological functioning are propounded, with little regard to their impact upon each other, and even less regard for what of value is lost in the promotion of 'new models.' Responding to this untenable polyglot, some organizations have de-emphasized their consideration of controversies over what

occurs intrapsychically in the consulting room, focusing rather on the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking for community action.

In this brief paper, I point to several aspects of Freud's discoveries that are evident in a specific—and somewhat maverick—reading of his early writings, but that seem to have been lost even in his own later formulations of his discipline, and conspicuously in those of his heirs. That is, I will schematize much of the history of this putative discipline as one in which a revolutionary vision of humanity has been domesticated in the promulgation of 'new models'—models that are, in a sense, pre-Freudian in their assumptions about the human condition. The fuller arguments in support of this thesis have been elaborated elsewhere [1–5].
