Emotions and Memory: By David Rapaport. The Menninger Clinic Monograph Series No. 2. Second Unaltered Edition. (New York: International Universities Press, 1950.)

David Rapaport has given us a psychologist's view of the interrelationships between emotions and memory. In this scholarly work, he has attempted to correlate the views of classical psychology, experimental psychology and the growing body of psycho-analytic knowledge. This he accomplishes with a rare ability to work within a multiplicity of frames of reference, and he successfully overrides the problem of varying and sometimes apparently contradictory terminologies. While he honestly labels the volume a preliminary effort, there is much that the clinically trained psycho-analyst can learn from this book about the work of scientists in related fields. Rapaport promises us another volume in the near future, and we look forward with eager anticipation to his further efforts. For the problem of memory (and its emotional repression) lies at the very cornerstone of psycho-analytic theory, and is the basis on which Freud built his theory of the unconscious. Perhaps the psycho-analytic world has accepted these basic postulates too uncritically—and perhaps not. The work of Rapaport and others like him, capable of working in borderline disciplines, will offer us the answer.