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.
It does not seem extravagant to say that this is one of the most brilliant pieces of scholarship to appear on the psycho-analytic horizon in a long time. Lucidly conceived, tightly organized and richly documented every page of the way, Dr Gill's monograph dispels an important confusion in psycho-analytic theory, and in the process of doing so, introduces a wealth of ancillary clarifications.
Since Freud introduced the structural theory in 1923, as the tripartite systemic (not systematic) division of the personality, to replace the topographic one, the latter concept has occupied a vague and shifting position in the framework of psycho-analytic theory as a whole. Freud himself, as Gill points out, occasionally used the latter term as though he were still referring to a theory of systems, and other writers still do so. It is to clarify the place of the topographic concept in psycho-analytic theory that Gill has written his monograph. From his argument there emerges the conclusion that the most useful and unambiguous meaning of the term 'topographic' is that of the relationship of particular psychic phenomena to consciousness, and that, since one can subsume this relationship under each of the five metapsychological points of view—dynamic, genetic, economic, structural and adaptive—'the topographic point of view cannot be considered as an independent metapsychological point of view on a par with them'. To be sure, says the author, despite this logical (and to me, methodologically sound) consideration, one may still wish to include the topographic point of view in the metapsychological pattern at the highest level of abstraction, but he believes that his is the more 'parsimonious and heuristic' choice. A detailed account of the evidence which he presents to demonstrate how the relationship to consciousness is subsumed under each of the five metapsychological categories cannot be given in a review, but if it is a convincing one, as I believe it is, the principle of