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The hallmark of this volume is energy—not "psychic energy" (which is a bête noire in the content of the book)—but an energy of purpose, excitement about a project and prospect. Both the commendable and not so commendable qualities of the book derive from this characteristic.
A conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, titled "The Vital Issues," was held in November, 1981. This book represents half of a truncated record of the conference, topically rearranged for publication by the editors. They explain that "… many of the most outstanding contributors to the symposium whose presentations focused on psychoanalytic theory could not make their presentations available to us" because of prior publishing commitments (p. xiv). A companion volume will contain the more clinical contributions to the conference.
Psychoanalysis as an Intellectual Discipline is divided into section on: "The Origins of Motivation," "Interdisciplinary Problems," "Creativity and the Life Course" and "Epistemology of Psychoanalysis." There are fourteen papers, four section introductions, and five commentaries or responses. The introductions are the most energetic and in some ways the most interesting parts of the book. Those by Janet Rocah (motivation) and George Pollock (life course) are admirable, the former for its precision, the latter for the effectiveness of its appeal. While it is hard to see much that is particularly psychoanalytic in George Moraitis's section on interdisciplinary problems, his own paper "The Two Readings of 'The Education of Henry Adams'" is highly rewarding. This came as a surprise: I avoided the paper until I had finished reading the others because of my long-standing disinterest in Henry Adams and his "education." Moraitis in this paper is erudite and methodologically sophisticated. The paper is a model for the application of psychoanalysis to works of literature and also offers a valuable prototype of a working me