Book Notices

SYMBOL AND NEUROSIS: SELECTED PAPERS OF LAWRENCE S. KUBIE. Edited by Herbert J. Schlesinger. Psychological Issues, Monograph 44. New York: International Universities Press. 277 pp., $10 (paper), $15 (hard cover).

No one reading this journal is likely to need to have Larry Kubie identified, and many readers will find old friends among those of his papers collected here. For the editor has done a careful and judicious job of selecting from Kubie's astonishingly prolific output nine of his most memorable contributions to psychoanalysis, introduced by a 40-page essay on "Lawrence S. Kubie's Psychoanalysis" by Eugene B. Brody. Beginning with a warm personal memoir of a dynamic and charismatic man, Brody goes on to provide a useful, integrative summary of Kubie's main theoretical ideas. Brief as it is, it succeeds remarkably well in providing the synoptic overview and knitting together of his ideas that Kubie strove unsuccessfully to achieve in his last years, when his synthetic functioning began to flag under the onslaught of the aging process.

It is striking, as one reads over these pages, to see how Kubie foreshadowed later trends not only in psychoanalysis but in other fields. Here are his critiques of economic and structural concepts, long before criticizing metapsychology became respectable and common. Here are numerous reminders that he was one of the earliest, most persistent, and best-informed exponents of the view that psychoanalysts can profit from remaining abreast of progress in the neurosciences, where his own manifold career began. And in contemporary social psychology, "attribution theory" is just catching up with Kubie's seminal idea, first expressed in 1934 and well expounded in the present chapter 3, that every symbol—indeed, every cognitive process—has an internal, bodily, or "I-pole" as well as an external, non-I one.

His most original and stimulating papers are here, still full of