You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To receive and review volume 52 of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child is reassuring when psychoanalytic theories and institutions are challenged from outside and within the psychoanalytic community. It is like receiving confirmation that the Eiffel Tower or the Tower of London are still standing. To provide an exhaustive review of the present annual impossible, for the present volume contains close to 400 pages, comprising 21 articles in five domains of interest to psychoanalysts. As the privileged owner of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child since volume 1, 1945, I consider them essential reference books that should be in every analyst's library, side by side with the Standard Edition.
Unfortunately, not everyone shares this view, for I have often heard from analysts working exclusively with adults that they seldom refer to The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Such remarks are not necessarily a reflection of the analyst's ignorance but of the problematic status that child analysis has for many analysts. The title of the series is misleading, for in most issues the articles deal with basic concepts of psychoanalytic theory. In the present issue, E. A. Schwaber's “Reflections on the Concept: The Patient's Psychic Reality” has ramifications for problems such as false memory syndrome and intersubjectivity—themes that predominate recent reviews and journals.
R. J Fax's “Boys' Envy of Mother and the Consequences of this Narcissistic Mortification” can be looked upon as heir to the seminal papers of Greenson (, , especially the 1968 paper1). Dr. Fax's paper allows us to realize the importance of the developmental point of view, in the sense that, despite a clinically successful child analysis, certain conflicts can find their final resolution only at a later developmental phase. Though the article is centred on the vicissitudes of gender identity, I think the author should have commented on the fact that such a pathological mother-son relationship can also be very de