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The first psychoanalytic review that I (SE) wrote was an appraisal of a collection of Loewald's: I believe the review was titled “Loewald: A Friendly Critic from Within.” In that volume, Loewald was strongly critical of the ego psychology of that era. While I perceived him as a friendly critic, I was to learn that analysts like Arlow and Brenner did not find him quite as friendly. Morris Eagle has written two volumes that embody the appellation of a friendly critic. Yet, as with Loewald, there are many who will not find him as affable as my description of him. Eagle is clearly a psychoanalytic thinker, a theorist, critic, and researcher who values psychoanalysis and wants analytic theory to be clearly and coherently stated. For those of us who see ourselves as well-versed in the psychoanalytic literature, many will be surprised at the number of studies in the literature that we have either not read or not considered seriously in terms of the importance of their findings. For this reason alone, Morris Eagle's volumes are well worth the price. He has provided the reader what no other psychoanalytic volume that we know of has accomplished. He has done a remarkable job in assembling the literature relevant to the concepts he is examining and eloquently discusses the evidence for these concepts. Somewhat tongue in check, we would propose that the difficulty many will have with Eagle is that he actually wants to view and evaluate the empirical evidence that supports a concept or theory.
The two volumes are titled Core Concepts in Classical Psychoanalysis and Core Concepts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Both have the same