Attraction and Hostility: An Experimental Analysis of Interpersonal and Self Evaluation: By Albert Pepitone. London: Tavistock Publications. 1971. Pp. xx + 238.

Reading and evaluating this book is not an easy task for a psychoanalyst, partly because the author adopts an approach which in some respects is diametrically opposed to that which one struggles to develop and sustain as a psychoanalyst, partly because the technical language s unfamiliar.

Professor Pepitone attempts to deal with the fact that the subject of attraction and hostility is vast and enormously complicated by deliberately trying to restrict himself to a narrow, precisely defined aspect of the topic which he studies experimentally. A psychoanalyst struggles, often with limited success, to be receptive to all the data available to him and makes of it what sense he can. I found reading the book both demanded great discipline in allowing Professor Pepitone to direct my attention to the phenomena with which he was dealing and his way of dealing with them, and also constantly diverted my attention to other apparently relevant phenomena which he seemed to ignore.

Professor Pepitone circumscribed his field of study by focusing on what he felt to be 'a common denominator of a good many attraction and hostility measures—interpersonal and selfevaluation'. He goes on to postulate that interpersonal and self evaluations are, in part, determined by a cognitive validation process. Professor Pepitone accepts, however, that irrational factors play an important part in interpersonal and self evaluation.

From that position Professor Pepitone painstakingly sets out to develop experimental situations in which the contribution of the cognitive validation processes to interpersonal and self evaluation can be demonstrated and tested. He is meticulous and determined in his attempts to exclude and control extraneous factors. After a long, carefully sequential series of experiments, he concludes that indeed 'many forms of attraction and hostility can be interpreted in part as attempts of the individual to validate his evaluations of himself and other persons'. No psychoanalyst w