Commitment and compassion in psychoanalysis: Selected papers of Edward M. Weinshel Edited by Robert Wallerstein Hillsdale, NJ:  Analytic Press. 2003.  384 pp.

This is a volume of selected clinical and theoretic papers written by one of our most distinguished psychoanalysts over the course of his career. There are helpful editorial comments by Robert Wallerstein, a touching introduction by Leonard Shengold and deeply moving tributes by members of Weinshel's family. The volume includes a list of the complete writings of Weinshel and a very helpful index.

There have been but a handful of eminent psychoanalysts like Weinshel who have ‘done it all’. ‘Eddie’ was a locally beloved and internationally renowned psychoanalyst. He was truly a very smart man, but he was also a very funny and warm person. His love for his patients and for psychoanalysis is everywhere present in the pages of this remarkable book.

The most visible virtues of these papers are in their content; in the originality and nuanced observations of his clinical work and in the astute critical judgment of his theoretic papers. The less visible merit of these papers resides in their tone. His special genius was in his character, his modesty. Weinshel had a great gift for relentlessly insisting on explicit recognition of the ambiguities and uncertainties of all of our psychoanalytic ideas, first and foremost his own. The reader gains a gradual sense when reading these papers of a deepening awareness of Weinshel's rare ability to insist on the enormous value of what psychoanalysis has contributed to our understanding of the human mind balanced by his wonderful exposures of the weakness in many of our still cherished assumptions. For example, in an era when it took considerably more courage than it would currently, he challenged us to re-examine the notion of the synthetic function of the ego, one of the inviolate assumptions of ego-psychology which was his own preferred theoretic model:

There is the tendency to assume that there ‘is’ such a (synthetic) tendency, and yet disproportionately little is known or understood about its sources, its modes of operation, or even i