You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Volume III of the four-volume Downstate 25th Anniversary Series is an impressive collection of twenty essays written expressly for the commemoration. The varied topics, the somewhat different psychoanalytic approaches, the authors' individual styles, along with the artful juxtaposition of the articles themselves, provide a series of refreshing contrasts. Inasmuch as the authors, however, share a similar understanding of basic psychoanalytic concepts, an overall sense of unity is achieved. More importantly, the articles are significant reference works and welcome additions to psychoanalytic literature.
Of the eleven articles in Part I, 'Clinical Dimensions', the editors note that four relate to social phenomena. Alan Eisnitz discusses aspects of brainwashing, radical political beliefs and loving, while demonstrating the importance of self-representatives in the choice of love objects, ideas, and idealized beliefs. Jan Frank examines the inability to reflect introspectively and illustrates one example of such a difficulty—a group of scientists who cannot permit themselves to think uninhibitedly, as a consequence of guilt about having survived the Holocaust. Robert A. Savitt addresses a problem, seen in young adults, which he calls 'love addiction' because of its similarities to the psychopathology of a drug addiction. Using material from patients addicted to heavy smoking and to heavy drinking, C. Philip Wilson explores the universal symbol of sand as found in his patients' dreams.
Two papers deal with the psychoanalytic process itself. Joseph T. Coltrera provides an erudite study of the nature of interpretations, drawing upon historic as well as current psychoanalytic references. He delineates changes in Freud's concepts of interpretation and offers his own clarifications. Robert Dickes distinguishes between therapeutic and working alliances, indicating useful approaches to the disruption of the two alliances in the course of an analysis.
Two further papers co