Life, Sex and Death: Selected Writings. : By William H. Gillespie. Edited and introduced by Michael D. A. Sinason with an overview by Charles W. Socarides. London and New York: Routledge. 1995. Pp. 208.

This short volume is divided into two main sections. The first thirty-five pages offer a detailed biographical note on Gillespie's life by Michael Sinason as well as Charles Socarides’ interesting remarks on Gillespie's theories on perversion. The second section (123 pages) contains twelve of Gillespie's papers selected by Sinason, and is divided into two sub-sections. One is entitled ‘The Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual Development and Sexual Deviation’ and covers some of Gillespie's main contributions on the subject of sexual perversions. The other, entitled ‘The Forces of Life and Death’, renders justice to the attractive title of the book. The final ten pages of the volume consist of a comprehensive chronological list of Gillespie's published and unpublished writings and the References. Gillespie himself shared some of the editorial task and contributed to giving shape to the biographical notes.

I think that the inclusion of the papers on ‘Aggression and instinct theory’, ‘Some regressive phenomena in old age’ and ‘The end of life’ was an excellent editorial choice, because it allows for a retrospective appreciation of some of Gillespie's early affirmations on the role of drives in psychopathology and especially on the role of aggression in perverse organisations. They also enable us to follow the developing process of Gillespie's formulations and the presence in his lucid mind (an ‘anatomist of the psyche’, Socarides calls him) of doubts and queries that have paved the way for further research and clinical validation of normal and pathological psychosexual development. An example of this can be found in his argumentations questioning Freud's claim of the existence of a death instinct, meant as a strong tendency to return to an inorganic state.

The important theoretical implications for psychoanalytic practice contained in all the papers almost—but not completely—compensate