Development and Psychopathology. Studies in Psychoanalytic Psychiatry: By Clifford Yorke, Stanley Wiseberg and Thomas Freeman. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1989. Pp. 243.

In their introduction to Development and Psychopathology the authors refer to the book's history: it was Thomas Freeman who for many years brought to the Anna Freud Centre material from his psychotic patients that he had evaluated with the help of the profile schema of Anna Freud. The case studies were concerned not only with adult pathology but also with the possible childhood antecedents and forerunners of these disorders. In time Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham and the authors of this book decided to form a study group with the aim of extending the enquiry to non-psychotic disorders and also of planning publication of the material.

The study group was led by the conviction that a developmental perspective on psychoanalysis is essential for the psychological understanding of an informed psychiatry. The authors stress that they see the value for general psychiatry in the presentation of a psychoanalytic model of the mind rather than presenting psychoanalysis as 'practised in the consulting room' (p. viii). Moreover, they state clearly that they regard psychoanalysis as a method of therapy applicable only to a selected range of disorders but they hope that their presentation will encourage informed psychoanalytic management and treatment of the wide range of disorders this book covers.

In its theoretical orientation the book is firmly based on Freud's metapsychological theories and further developments within the classical psychoanalytical frame of reference. The authors explicitly state that they wish this approach to be distinguished from those psychoanalytic theories of the mind which they regard as far removed from the classical psychoanalytic body of knowledge. Answering the criticism that metapsychology reduces highly organised and differentiated mental activity to the language of forces, energy and structures, the authors stress that metapsychological concepts are of an explanatory nature. They act as tools and are means not ends of our understanding.

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