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Hans Loewald, who is currently Professor Emeritus at Yale and faculty member of the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis, has written a most stimulating and thought-provoking book. His orientation, which is firmly rooted in classical Freudian analysis, emerges in these writings to emphasize psychoanalysis as an interactional process. Within this interaction, he emphasizes both intrapsychic and interpsychic processes.
The book is a collection of papers written between 1951 and 1979. There are 24 papers in all, each a chapter of the book. The author has divided the book into two parts, corresponding to his personal interests. The first part is entitled Concepts and Theory; the second is entitled The Psychoanalytic Process.
The book begins with the interesting paper, “Ego and Reality.” The themes of the wish for mother and the hostile father have generally been overemphasized in the psychoanalytic literature. In this paper the author calls attention to the dread associated with union with mother and the positive aspects of the relationship with father. Ego and reality are originally undifferentiated. There is no distinction between ego, id and the external reality. In the stage of primary narcissism the experience of reality is so significantly different from that of the mature ego that it might best be referred to as primary reality. It is through modifying influences of the external world that differentiation of ego and reality take place. The author postulates that increasing emancipation from mother is associated with ever-growing tension. Libidinal forces arise which seek to reestablish the primary narcissistic union with mother. This conflict between emancipation from mother and the wish for mother proceeds through the various psychosexual stages of development and is resolved through the castration threat, which is seen as representing the demands of the external reality to which the maturing ego must submit. For Freud, external reality is associated wi