Development and Pathology of the Self. The Pchiatric Clinics of North America, 4(3): Edited by Kenneth Robson. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1981, 147 pp., $42.00 per volume (3 issues per year).

In his foreword, Robson, as editor, indicates the purpose of the volume—the integration of childhood data relating to self development. He also suggests an emphasis on the theories of Heinz Kohut. Most, but not all the authors follow this emphasis.

Marjorie McDonald, in a brief review of the psychoanalytic concept of the self and the self-representation before Kohut, notes "it is not enough merely to treat the structural conflicts that underlie the neurotic symptoms" (p. 142). Implying thereby a dichotomy between narcissistic and other forms of conflict, including the structural, she belies this view in a second article, on the psychoanalytic treatment of a young boy with a "traumatic psychosis." In this sensitive and most interesting account, she demonstrates the intertwining of the boy's object-related, instinctually derived conflicts with the structural regression connected with his shattered self.

Anna Ornstein gives a concise and extremely lucid summary of Kohut's views on development, and then applies these to childhood disorders. She believes most childhood psychopathology represents disorders of the self, the result of the parents' inability to offer themselves as adequate "selfobjects." She suggests that a major focus of