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This rich and absorbing book is a memorial to Donald Cohen MD, best known to psychoanalysts from his work at the Yale Child Study Center and his many papers elucidating psychoanalytic perspectives on psychopathology and development. I begin this review by acknowledging with regret that I missed the opportunity to know Dr Cohen, who was widely regarded as an extraordinary colleague and mentor to many of the most celebrated names in the child development research and child psychoanalysis today. Indeed the picture of the man that emerges, both from this collection of his selected papers and presentations, and from posthumous tributes to him included in the volume and elsewhere (see especially the section dedicated to his memory in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 58, 2003) is, in my view, the apotheosis of the North American child psychoanalyst: the clinician/scholar/scientist who fearlessly integrates scientific research with a perspective committed to understanding the mind of the child from a contemporary psychodynamic viewpoint, while remaining deeply respectful of psychoanalytic traditions. In this, as he notes in his chapter entitled ‘The Self under Siege’, he pursues Freud's abandoned dream of linking “the neurological and constitutional factors on the one hand, and the dynamic processes of the unconscious mental life” (p. 84). Peter Fonagy, in his Foreword to this volume and, with Mary Target, in their tribute published in the aforementioned Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (Fonagy and Target, 2003), speaks of Cohen's ‘genius’ that found expression in his revolutionary integration, his ‘brain-child’ discipline of psychodynamic developmental psychopathology.
Cohen's autobiographical presentations in this book trace the roots of that integration in his personal intellectual history which sought to reconcile the divergent views of development prevalent in the 1960s: that is, the Skinnerian experimental model, where “the inner experiences of the child are an e