By J.-B. Pontalis. New York: Int. Univ. Press, 1980, 203 pp., $25.00.

The key word in the title of this book is "Between." Although the author declares at the beginning that this simply corresponds to the order of the texts, the first being on the dream and the last on psychic pain, an immersion in the book's substance reveals that the emphasis throughout is on "the in-between." The focus everywhere is away from foci. Always we are asked to look between concrete nodes of material, whether data, observations, ideas, or theories, from the positive to the negative, behind any space-occupying psychic elements to what lies between them, or at the spaces they occupy. Always the eye is directed away from content to the ineluctible, the evanescent, the