Mahler And Kohut: Perspectives On Development, Psychopathology, And Technique.: Edited by Selma Kramer and Salman Akhtar. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1994, 182 pp., $27.50.

This book is a compendium of the papers and discussions presented at the Twenty-fifth Annual Margaret S. Mahler Symposium on Child Development held on May 1, 1993, in Philadelphia. It consists of eight chapters, which include main papers by Selma Kramer, Calvin F. Settlage, Ernest S. Wolf, and Howard B. Levine. The other four chapters are discussions by Mary Anne Delaney, Salman Akhtar, Thomas Wolman, and Newell Fisher.

The appearance of this first book to compare, contrast, and integrate the work of these two currently influential psychoanalytic theorists is a timely one. Psychoanalysis has been in a stage of ferment over the past two decades as psychoanalysts have been presented a variety of new conceptual models whose advocates have urged either an integration with classical theory or a replacement of it (Sugarman and Wilson, 1995). Relational concepts, in particular, burst onto the American scene, leading to modifications and alterations of the prevailing structural model that had melded American psychoanalysis as it is practiced by those analysts affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association. Particularly prominent contributions to relational thinking from this side of the Atlantic have been those by Margaret S. Mahler and Heinz Kohut.1 Thus, an opportunity to examine the