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This excellent book is a testimony to the fact that teaching is father to learning, for the chapters of which it is composed began life, as the authors say in their Introduction, as a series of lectures at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. The twelve lectures were published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology between 1972 and 1982. Various dog-eared offprints have found their way around the world, especially to the United Kingdom, the United States and Israel where teachers and students of Freudian psychology have found them to be an enlightening map of Freud's developing thought. So it is a great pleasure, nearly thirty years after the publication of the first lecture, to have all the lectures united into a book at last, added to and amended a bit, but retaining their original freshness and usefulness. The book is a reminder of the clarity of Sandler's teaching and it increases once again our regret and sorrow at his untimely death.
Sandler and his co-authors divide Freud's thinking into three main frames of reference: the affect-trauma model from the mid-1880s to 1897, the topographical model from 1897 to 1923, and the structural model from 1923 to 1939. This is an admirable delineation, though perhaps a little confusing when one is talking to Continental or Latin American colleagues, for they customarily speak of only two models, the topographical and the structural, evidently regarding the affecttrauma model as an early phase of the topographical model.
After the Introduction the book begins with a brief description of the three frames of reference, followed by a statement of basic psychoanalytic tenets. The authors make it clear that they strive to deal only with the essential outlines of Freud's thought, omitting debates about the finer points that have exercised Freud scholars for many years. Nor do they debate the validity of Freud's basic assumptions about drives (‘instincts’), the unconscious, the ‘mental apparatus’, determinism