Ego Functions in Schizophrenics, Neurotics, and Normals: Leopold Bellack, Marvin Hurvich, and Helen K. Gediman,  John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1973,  571 pp.

Bellak and his associates Hurvich and Gediman have disassembled the complex and hierarchically interrelated functions of the ego, seeking in this distillation a significance not only for improving both diagnosis and treatment, especially for schizophrenia, but also for further refinements of ego concepts. Under a five year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, this study was undertaken to compare the ego functioning of a population divided into schizophrenic, neurotic, and normal. This volume is a description of these comprehensive efforts.

Divided into four main sections, it begins with a discussion of the concept of the ego and its history in psychoanalytic knowledge and especially its gradual and increasing importance from the time of the introduction of the structural theory. The second section unfolds and contains an encompassing examination on the nature and functions of the ego as viewed by psychoanalytic writers, researchers, neurophysiologists, and others. The essential instrument of the investigation, the clinical interview, is forged from this background. Specially adapted psychological tests followed by a variety of experimental laboratory procedures and the statistical results make up the third section. In the fourth section, the authors describe how the screening material, primarily the clinical interview, provides data on both deficits and assets, particularly of the schizophrenic, thus permitting incisive pharmacological and psycho-therapeutic decisions. An appendix provides the clinical interview and the rating scale. One hopes that the next printing of this important volume will be more carefully edited in order to avoid both bibliographical and syntactical carelessness.

This work centers on the effort to examine and transform twelve ego functions into an experimental design. Briefly listed, these are Reality Testing; Judgment; Sense of Reality of the World and the Self; Regulation and Control of Drives; Affects, and Impulses; Object Re