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It is with great pleasure that we accept the Editor's invitation to comment on Virginia Demos's review of the first three sections of The Handbook of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. First, as an aid to readers who have not seen a copy of the Handbook, we offer a listing of the chapters that served as the basis for Dr. Demos's comments.
—Part I. Background. Chapters: Introduction to interpersonal psychoanalysis; History of the founders of interpersonal psychoanalysis.
—Part II. Basic Issues. Chapters: The interpersonal self, uniqueness, will, and intentionality; Attachment, relationship, and love; Cognition and language; Anxiety; Emotion; Creativity; Gender and sexuality.
—Part III. Development. Chapters: Infancy; The childhood and juvenile eras; Preadolescence and adolescence; Adulthood and aging.
The remainder of the Handbook comprises twenty-five other chapters grouped under the headings Psychopathology, The Analytic Process, Aspects of Technique, and Special Topics (e.g., the treatment of children, the relationship between interpersonal psychoanalysis and family therapy, supervision, etc.), and a Glossary of Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Terms.
We appreciate the time and attention Demos has given to the Handbook, and we are pleased that she feels we have satisfied our aims and produced an informative and readable volume. It is clear that she wishes her review to be read with that in mind. However, Demos devotes most of her review to a challenge: we should have gone beyond the purposes that inspired the volume. Demos might be surprised to learn that we conceived and edited the Handbook to accomplish many of the very aims she champions. As we stated in the Introduction to the Handbook, we wanted to offer a comprehensive review of the literature of interpersonal psychoanalysis, with the aims of presenting its diversity, facilitating its integration, and permitting comparison to other psychoanalytic views. We suggested that such an integration would promote the possibility t