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Both authors of this book are graduates and faculty members of the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research, members of the American Psychoanalytic Association and of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis. These facts, together with the emphasis on “contemporary” in the title, create expectations of a broad-based, pluralistic stance in introducing the audience to psychoanalytic theory, concepts, data, and technique.
Such expectations are quickly extinguished, however, as this book is essentially a thorough and excellent introduction to “classical” Freudian theory and technique with a relatively cursory description of some recent revisions and innovations in theory. Unmentioned are a number of early and recent theorists and contributors who, while having had a great impact on the contemporary psychoanalytic scene, have, to varying degrees, been organizationally and theoretically unallied with orthodox psychoanalytic circles in the United States. Although this provincialism makes the title misleading and is the book's primary weakness, it is still very valuable and informative reading for those interested in an introductory work of relatively limited scope. The book's value extends even to readers more sophisticated than the “medical students, nonpsychiatric physicians, and parapsychiatric personnel” for which the material is specifically intended.
The opening chapter offers an historical account of the birth of psychoanalysis and the major discoveries and concepts, such as transference, counter-transference, the unconscious, the relevance and use of dreams and free association, drive theory, psychic determinism, and the conflict theory of psychic functioning and behavior. The central analytic task is crisply defined as “the careful investigation of the attitudes that the patient ascribes to the analyst,” and psychopathology as the degree of limitation in an individual's ability “to adapt to life's changing requirements.”
The next four chapter