Book Notices

FREUD AND HIS SELF-ANALYSIS. DOWNSTATE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY SERIES, VOL. i. Edited by Mark Kanzer and Jules Glenn. New York: Aronson, 1979, 300 pp., $25.00.

This volume and its companion volume, Freud and His Patients, as well as Volumes III and IV still in preparation, are part of a series offered to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Downstate Psychoanalytic Institute in 1974. The authors of the essays presented in this collection were faculty members of the Downstate Institute, which has in the last several years moved its affiliation to the New York University Medical Center and changed its name to The Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center. Contributors to this volume, in addition to the editors, are Harold Blum, Roy Lilleskov, Max Schur, Leonard Shengold, and Julian Stamm.

This collection of essays demonstrates what psychoanalytic institutes at their best provide for their members: a rich and nurturing environment that encourages the development of individual creative capacities. That this atmosphere existed at the Downstate Institute is apparent in the high quality of the contributions to this volume. Thirteen of the eighteen papers have appeared previously in other publications, but bringing them together in this volume presents a unique view of Freud's development and thinking, his personal analysis as carried out by himself and others. Kanzer notes in his introduction that Freud's career was built on his disposition to relentlessly dissect his own feelings, adding that "our ability to learn how he did this is based to no small extent on the thousands of letters he wrote in his lifetime, one avenue by which the introspective may reach out to others for a needed sharing of minds." The subject matter of these essays is derived to a great extent from the published Fliess letters, the correspondence with Carl Jung, Karl Abraham, Arnold Zweig, and other letters made available through Ernst Freud.

In "Freud and the