The Annual of Psychoanalysis, Volume VIII: Edited by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. New York: International Universities Press. 1981. Pp. 359.

This volume, a publication of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, is indeed a scholarly and stimulating book. Its 359 pages encompass eighteen papers and an index. The volume is subdivided into six sections covering: I, Psychoanalysis as a Science, II, Psychoanalytic Education, III, Clinical Theory, IV, Clinical Psychoanalysis, V, Interdisciplinary Research and VI, Applications.

Five of the papers, or almost one third of this book, deal with different ramifications of the psychology of the self, particularly around material reflecting Kohut's theoretical formulations and technique. These papers are located in the sections on Clinical Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis, and the emphasis of this point of view may not be surprising in light of this publication emanating from the Chicago Institute. These papers presume a working familiarity with Kohut's views, and are bound to raise in the reader strong agreement or disagreement with the evaluation and handling of the clinical material presented. One's position depends on how much one accepts the concept of the central role of empathy, self-object transferences, and the diagnostic category of narcissistic disorders as related to these theoretical formulations. Certainly, as the reader examines the clinical material in these papers, one is struck by the relative paucity or absence of such issues as guilt being the motive force in the resistance, along with the related and fundamental issues of incestuous and destructive wishes also having a capacity to promulgate a 'narcissistic' defensive stance in the resistance. The inevitable presence of these broader and universal psychological conflicts in a person amenable to analysis appears to oppose a view such as Kohut's, where the resistance is simply due to the patient being aware or 'admitting' that he fears suffering a loss of some part of his idealized or grandiose self, or that he might be in danger of fractionating. It seems to me that a paradox in the tre