Psychoanalytic Sociology, an Essay on the Interpretation of Historical Data and the Phenomena of Collective Behaviour: By Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt. Baltimore and London: Hopkins University Press. 1973. Pp. 122.

This concise and closely reasoned book is written by an historian and a sociologist who are well acquainted with the psychoanalytical literature, particularly recent American ego psychology. The work is directed towards the development of a theory of social change, based on the integration of psychoanalytical hypotheses and assumptions with those of normative sociology. The reader therefore

needs to have some familiarity with both sociological theory and modern ego psychology.1

Weinstein and Platt begin with a review and critical appraisal of Freud's initial application of psychoanalytical theory to society and point out the limitations imposed by the framework of the first instinct theory and by the absence of a comprehensive theory of psychic structure. His theories of the interaction of man and society took neither object relations into account nor his later versions of the development and nature of psychic structure. For Freud the effective environment is the family. The authors welcome the Eriksonian model which is based on Freud's later structural theory and which aims to integrate in a comprehensive way internal reality and social objects. However, even Erikson's theories, they consider, are limited by his continued commitment to the ontogenetic-familial model, as are the other psychoanalytically based theories which they discuss.

They emphasize that those aspects of our theories useful to sociological positions must lie in the realms of object relationships. People in society are, by definition, in re