Education and psychoanalytic theory have been involved in a long, complex courtship. As true lovers will, they have quarrelled, parted, been reunited without once giving up their basic understanding that each has much to give and gain from the other. Now, finally in this volume we have, if not a marriage, an announcement to wed.

As Bertram J. Cohler points out in the opening chapter, the two fields share a focus on factors that help development. Many early psychoanalysts—Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Ernst Kris and Erik Erikson to name a few—were also trained in education. Additionally, theoretical writing in the dual field goes back as far as Sigmund Freud's early writings on the one side and John Dewey and William James on the other.

Even so, no matter how long the history, interdisciplinary study that draws two fields even closer together is always difficult pioneering work. Later, having read the material, it is easy to say, 'Ah, of