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We should be grateful to the fledgling Free Association Books for their imaginative and adventurous list, bringing to an English speaking audience important essays such as The Ego Ideal by Chasseguet-Smirgel, and for sponsoring useful collections of articles such as The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition edited by Kohon. The present volume, one of the first to appear, is a collection of papers, a recorded seminar discussion and original articles by a group of sociologists, historians, psychologists and social workers who, roughly speaking, share the ideology of the Freud/Marx Sub-Group of the Radical Science Journal Collective, a member of which edited the volume, and wrote the 'Introduction' and one of the more interesting articles. Its avowed purpose is to effect some political arguments as to why a student and critic of contemporary capitalism should take a serious interest in the questions posed by Post-Freudian, object relations psychoanalysis.
Since the early nineteenth century (if not since time began) all analysts of psyche and of society have been concerned with the relationship between the two. Naturally, they assumed that the body and the species were an important, if not the only, source of potentials and limitations. However, the variability of social and cultural forms is too great to be explained in biological and physiological terms; and the variability of psychic life, even within a particular social and cultural pattern, is too great to be traced to what is conveniently termed the 'environment'. Thus, essential to the logic of psychoanalysis as a self-contained discipline is the attribution of motive and agency to the infant—if not the zygote, and the evidence does point to the early existence of some form of ego. However, this is still a matter for assumption—if not axiom, and the leap from sensation and instinct to the mind itself remains difficult and problematic. Although the theory of 'drives' has offered a half