Introduction

Abstract

This chapter will briefly survey the central features and overall structure of the research in psychodynamic analysis that will be detailed in the six chapters and three appendixes that follow. Several streams of thought and endeavor—philosophical, scientific, and professional—have contributed to this work. They can be traced to four main sources of origin:

• general psychodynamics as seen in its widest context and as unfolded through those analytic modes of approach which have been found most relevant to it;

• psychological science on the whole, but especially its fields and branches most pertinent to those characteristics of the psychobiological organism which can be appropriately described as personal;

• my earlier monograph concerning a basic analysis of inner psychological functions (Székely, 1965); and

• my empirical research based on the preceding three areas and extending the basic method of analysis set forth earlier, along the normal-abnormal continuum.