Parenthood: A Psychodynamic Perspective: Edited by Rebecca Cohen, Bertram Cohler, and Sidney Weissman. New York: Guiford Press, 1984, 426 pp., $30.00.

This book is the outcome of a 1980 Conference on Parenthood as an Adult Experience sponsored by the Michael Reese Department of Psychiatry. The editors present multifaceted material on what is currently known about this subject. Thirty-two authors, many of them prominent psychoanalysts, contributed twenty-five articles of varying degrees of complexity and differing theoretical viewpoints. The book is divided into four sections focusing on developmental, psychosocial, clinical and theoretical, and future perspective issues.

The reader will not find much of a unifying theme in Section I, "Developmental Perspectives," but will discover seven diverse, well-written articles. In "Sociobiological Perspectives on Parenthood" Jeanne Altmann, a biologist who worked with the Amboseli baboons in Southern Kenya, effectively explores the influence of the environment on psychic development and parenthood in adulthood. Her presentation is followed by a stimulating article by E. James Anthony, on "Creative Parenthood." Such parents cook up "… meals from mysterious left-overs like an alchemist … while holding … a crying child securely" (p. 25). Children in every developmental phase identify with such parents and become creative themselves. Then, Rebecca