Freud Reappraised: A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Theory: By Robert R. Holt. New York: Guilford Press, 1989, 433 pp., $40.00.

The ego-psychological metapsychology paradigm created as a development upon, and from, Freud's legacy, by Hartmann, Rapaport, Kris, Loewenstein, Jacobson, and a host of others, was both the hallmark and the apotheosis of psychoanalysis in America during those immediate post World War II decades when the American Psychoanalytic Association, swelled by (and to a considerable degree, dominated by) the recent transplanted tide of refugee colleagues fleeing Hitler's march across Europe, represented the majority in analysis worldwide, both in numbers and the most vigorous centers of its growth and dissemination. Within that galaxy David Rapaport stood out as the great and relentless systematizer of the metapsychological edifice, dedicated, via detailed and critical (and Talmudic) exegesis, to articulating all the component elements of a sprawling theoretical structure (or structures) into a logically comprehensive explanatory whole, which, with the filling in of some obvious gaps—the lack still of a truly psychoanalytic learning theory being a major one—could realize the ego psychologists' hegemonic dream of extending Freudian psychoanalysis from a drive- and conflict-based psychology developed from and explaining the psychopathological phenomena of the analytic consulting rooms into a transcendentally encompassing general psychology explaining the totality of human behavior, normal and abnormal, in all its ramifications.

Robert Holt was one of an extraordinary band of colleagues and students of Rapaport's (M. M Gill, R. Schafer, M. Brenman, and G. S. Klein being others) who were drawn to that vision and that task. This book, developed from the working and the writing of a professional lifetime, chronicles the intensity and intelligence of Holt's dedicated effort toward that now almost universally acknowledged, doomed task; and it recounts his struggles, out of the systematic conceptual