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This volume is devoted primarily to interdisciplinary papers. Some of the best contributions are written by scholars with backgrounds in disciplines outside psychoanalysis—sociology, religion, academic psychology—who use psychoanalytic ideas or reflect on psychoanalytic concepts. The three most outstanding papers are by Edwin Wallace, an analyst with a background in history; Nancy Chodorow, an analytic candidate and professor of sociology; and E. Virginia Demos, director of the Program of Counseling and Consulting Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As their contributions would not likely find a home in the major analytic quarterlies, we can once again appreciate the very important role of the Annual as an outlet for provocative, thoughtful, and stimulating discussions.
In the first section, "Theoretical Studies," John Gedo presents the position, elaborated in his recent books, that many different kinds of transferences, "referable to all phases of early development," are relived in the analytic situation. Gedo notes that "analytic technique has always involved shifts from interpreting either to confining our activities to the role of the empathic witness or to more active measures designed to lend patients psychological expertise." Analytic success, he argues, is contingent on the development of a "shared language between the participants." In every analysis we make choices about how we "encode our messages," and these must affect the analysand's experience of the treatment situation.
Edwin Wallace offers a more ambitious and ultimately more interesting discussion of epistemology. Wallace sets out to develop axioms and propositions for "a phenomenological and minimally theoretical psychoanalysis" (p. 8). Distancing himself from what he refers