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It is a difficult task to review an annual, even one with a tradition of high standards and excellence such as The Annual of Psychoanalysis. The great number of authors, the diversity of the content of the various papers (there are eighteen papers grouped under six different headings), as well as the diversity of the audiences or purposes to which the various papers are addressed make general comments and statements inadequate. The only adequate generalization might be that the editorial excellence and high standards of the previous editions have been maintained and that the diversity of papers may offer something to suit a diversity of readers. However, as in any such collection of papers, the quality and value of the contribution and the degree of controversy it may arouse varies.
The very first paper by George Pollock, "Freud as Scientist and Psychoanalysis as Science," was originally presented at the First International Symposium of the Unconscious, held at Tbilisi, Georgia, U.S.S.R., in October 1979. For that audience and purpose it is a clear, well-spoken exposition of analysis as a science that all analysts would probably find familiar and agree with. In contrast, there are five papers which deal primarily with Kohut's theories and their application which would be more controversial. These papers range from one by Roy Schafer, which offers a friendly critique of Kohut and discusses the relation between Schafer's action language and Kohut's psychology of the self, to Ernest S. Wolf's and James Wilson's study of "The 'Monday Crust' in the Disorders of the Self." The readers' response to these five papers would vary according to their views of Kohut's theories.
The section of the Annual on psychoanalytic education contains two particularly worthwhile and stimulating papers. The first is a hitherto unpublished paper of Otto Fenichel's entitled "Theoretical Implications of the Didactic Analysis." Fenichel's paper, which was originally delivered to a group o