Plea for a Measure of Abnormality: By Joyce McDougall. New York: International Universities Press, 1980, 493 pp., $32.50.

As one of the internationally known French psychoanalysts, Joyce McDougall demonstrates in this book her grasp of clinical psychoanalysis and, more particularly, her ability to describe the clinical situation out of which such theory arises. She regards a psychoanalytic encounter as a drama that involves two people—the patient and the analyst—and a host of other dramatis personae recreated by the patient in the analytic space in which both parties operate. The re-creation of this drama allows for the interplay between patient and analyst—between transference and countertransference—bringing a vividness to the encounter and to the efforts at understanding the inner conflicts, defensive maneuvers, fantasies, and psychic pain which are integral parts of living situations. The patients she describes cover a wide range of disorders, ranging from perverse sexuality, male and female homosexuality, psychosomatic disorders, narcissistic states and finally, the least analyzable of all, normality. All her patients deal with castration anxieties as almost the least of their suffering, with the greater degree of problems arising from early primitive levels of development in which all the vicissitudes of the differentiation and fusion of the self and the other are manifest. Throughout her description