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This book of essays, seventeen in all, is a fest-schrift in honour of Rafael Moses, the Israeli psychoanalyst, on his seventieth birthday. It is a diverse group of essays by distinguished contributors from Britain, Canada, Germany, Israel and the United States. The book, reflecting Moses's wide interests in individual and group psychology and how they extend into psychopolitical processes, is divided into four parts: firstly, two appreciative essays of the man and his work; secondly, essays concerning individual psychology; thirdly, essays concerning group and interpersonal psychological issues; and finally, essays emphasising psychoanalytic understanding of group political processes.
As the range of subject matter is wide, the theoretical approach is varied, and the attempts to bring psychoanalytic concepts to bear on a wide expanse of human experience, effort and action has varied results in the hands of these accomplished and serious contributors, no summary of the book as a whole is possible. Broadly speaking, it deals with issues of love and hate, how these imbue human experience, in particular interpersonal, group and political experience, and how psychoanalytic concepts may be brought to bear on such processes. The underlying hope of the book appears to be that increased understanding could lead to more effective and less destructive ways of dealing with group and political conflict.
A brief glance at the contents will indicate the diversity of the subject and approach of the essays. The articles in the section, ‘Within the individual’, include: Sandler & Sandler's useful discussion of the development of the psycho analytic conceptualisation of love, from energic concepts through object-relations theory, object- and self-representations, role-responsiveness, projective and introjective mechanisms and the capacity for empathy. This is followed by Harold Blum's article on aggression, violence and hatred and the ways in which these may be stimulated and tran