Yet, I was struck by the pervasive and tenacious influence of authority as a system of metacognition that tended, sooner or later, to drain the process of change of its vitality, however originally promising its beginning. I also became aware of the extent to which the lifeless quality I had come to recognize as symptomatic of the imprisoning influence of pathological accommodation on the lives of my patients had come more generally to infiltrate and permeate the field of psychoanalysis, even though this trend was not infrequently broken by particularly gifted analysts. These impressions of the vitality-stripping influence of an “adherence to the dictates of antiquity,” as Thomas Browne phrased it long ago, were strengthened as I found a similar influence in the attachments to divergent belief systems in the ranks of innovative schools of thought that were gathering influence.
