Professor Lidz, of the Yale University School of Medicine, has written what amounts to a definitive textbook on what he calls 'the normative development, structure and functioning of man'. To this large undertaking Professor Lidz brings a vast erudition and a lucid style. Professor Lidz's emphasis is that 'Any developmental psychology must appreciate and give due consideration to the unique nature of man's adaptive capacities—his ways of coping with his environment and surviving its hazards.'

Hence his is an integrative approach which combines the specifically psychoanalytic theory to the other researches in medical and psychiatric fields, particularly those of Adolf Meyer. This is a very useful book for medical students and psychiatrists who wish to get an overall picture of what is the contribution from the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry towards the understanding of the human person as a growing phenomenon in the matrix of culture.