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This is a fascinating volume, a tribute to the Editors who have crafted a book out of a series of papers that raise questions worth asking about 'Psychoanalysis and the Nuclear Threat'. There are few useful answers to these searching questions. However, the questions raised about this complex, tragic area of man's threats against man are of great importance and value for psychoanalysts, social scientists, philosophers and nuclear scientists as well as for reference libraries used by more general readers.
The book is conveniently divided into four sections: a penetrating Introduction, an uneven Theoretical Section, a controversial Clinical Section and a disappointing Afterword. Despite this organization, there are two major thematic questions that recur throughout the volume:
(1) Why is there so little data from clinical psychoanalytic or psychotherapy sessions to indicate that patients (children, adolescents and adults) are aware of or preoccupied with what is subsumed under the 'Nuclear Threat'? The 'Nuclear Threat' refers mostly to the threat of nuclear warfare and to the risks of developing and testing nuclear weapons. Though given less attention, the risks of developing and using nuclear energy for peaceful, civilian purposes are clearly implied.
In this volume, various authors, clinicians, and social scientists use non-clinical methods to force these issues into view through the use of questionnaires, directed interviews, and other polling instruments addressed to selected, usually highly literate populations.
(2) The second questioning theme, less prominent, but of great importance for clinicians, is whether in the clinical psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic situation, therapists can presume that concern about the 'Nuclear Threat' is so close to conscious awareness (or is so clearly being warded off by defence and as resistance) that our theory and technique can lead us to interpreting that concerns about the 'Nuclear Threat' are conspicuous by their abse