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At a time of growing interest in literary, biographic, and other scholarly applications of psychoanalysis (Edel, 1981) ; (Skura, 1981), several of the twelve psychobiographical essays on brothers who are writers that constitute this volume exemplify such interdisciplinary work at its best, as well as being written, as Normal Kiell points out, in a style that is 'refreshingly atypical of psychoanalytic prose' (p. 7). The more interaction, dialogue and collaboration that takes place between psychoanalysts and academic scholars, perhaps in interdisciplinary training programmes of the type from which several of the contributors to the present volume have benefited and with which a few of them are associated, the less likely are we to see the kind of heavy-handed and reductionist studies that have not infrequently characterized work in applied psychoanalysis, on the part of both groups, in the past. Fortunately, with the possible exception of Jean Kimball's essay on James and Stanislaus Joyce which, although descriptively interesting, comes perilously close to reducing their personalities and relationship to a mere illustration of Jung's introversion/extraversion schema and his theory of dominant and subordinate psychological functions, most of the contributions to the present volume are relatively free of what Kiell terms 'meretricious psychobiography' since their authors are, for the most part, 'wary of the not uncommon occupational risk of psychological biographers: hindsight fitted to a know-it-all theory' (p. 7).
The orienting and summarizing Introduction by the Editor offers a useful review of the essays in relation to issues such as the relationship between kinship and creativity and the sibling's reactions to one another's work. In addition, Kiell frequently provides information drawn from other biographical sources in order both to underline various points and to supplement certain of the more descriptive and less psychologically penetrating studies with know