The Purloined Self: Interpersonal Perspectives in Psychoanalysis: By Edgar Levenson. New York: William Alanson White Institute. 1991. Pp. 266.

Edgar Levenson is the director of training of the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City, which in turn is the primary centre of interpersonal psychoanalysis in the world. This volume is a collection of nineteen papers by Levenson spanning the years 1973-1990. In some measure it has the flavour of an authoritative statement of interpersonal psychoanalysis, since it is the first volume in the Contemporary Psychoanalysis Books series published by the White Institute. Nevertheless, interpersonal psychoanalysis is by no means monolithic, as Levenson emphasises and as the valuable journal of the White society, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, attests.

I have been interested in interpersonal psychoanalysis for some time and indeed am regarded by some colleagues as a member of that school. Interpersonal psychoanalysis, an outgrowth of Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry, is beginning to be treated much more respectfully by mainstream psychoanalysis. I recall a startlingly scornful review by Edith Jacobson (1955), usually a temperate and even-handed critic, of Sullivan's Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry(1953).

The title of the book, The Purloined Self, is taken from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Purloined Letter' (1938), the message of which is that the best place to hide something is in plain view. And that is the message of Levenson's book: what the analyst should be looking for in the analytic situation is in plain view. It is what is going on between analyst and analysand. It is plain to see but seems hidden, because one or the other or both participants would be made anxious were they to look at what is there.

Levenson sums up his view of the difference between Freudian psychoanalysis and interpersonal psychoanalysis this way: in Freudian analysis 'people are made ill by their fantasies, by the symbolic