Book excerpt: Over the approximately 100-year course of the development of psychoanalytic theory, from its Freudian foundations to its current fragmented state, psychoanalytic theory has largely abandoned coherence and the inspiration to understand the human mind, argues Rangell Far from suggesting that psychoanalysis be abandoned, he instead traces the evolution of the various strands of psychoanalytic theory so that what is valuable can be extracted and included in a new effort to formulate a unitary theory.