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E. G. SCHACHTEL, Ph.D.: Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Tests. New York: Basic Books, 1966, 322 pages, $7.95.
THE PUBLICATION of Ernest G. Schachtel's long awaited Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test9 provides a most fitting occasion for an examination of the contributions of this remarkable scholar to contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Taken together, his earlier Metamorphosis10 and the present volume constitute a carefully plotted seemingly deliberate examination of the psychological underpinnings of the psychoanalytic concepts prevalent in neo-Freudian and humanistic-existential approaches to clinical practice. I say seemingly deliberate because various chapters of the two books have appeared as publications in professional journals over a 20-year period in rather a different sequence than they emerge in these books. One cannot avoid the feeling, however, that a grand plan shaped itself early, a long-range program whose major outlines are only now becoming clear to Dr. Schachtel's long-term readers.
The task that Dr. Schachtel has set for himself seems no less than the formulation of a fundamental psychological model for the interpersonal theory of Sullivan, Fromm, Horney, and various clinicians who adhere to some phase of the increasingly convergent neo-Freudian and existential positions in contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology. As one delves deeper into the crucial issues of a