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This major volume, inexpensive and very worthwhile for all psychoanalytic students and practitioners, and for use as a text in appropriate psychoanalytic training courses, is an outstanding contribution to the scholarly literature in our field. Its major foci are two: (1) an explication of Kohut, although somewhat unsympathetic, along with a thorough and ingenious critique; (2) a somewhat more scattered, less cohesive integration throughout the book of the ideas of George Klein, and to a much lesser degree John Gedo and others as regards the supraordinate-self and supraordinate-self organization. Eagle is clearly quite sympathetic to these ideas, although throughout his book he is at pains to do what relatively few analysts do: he lets us know that he believes in no messiahs, and that not Freud, George Klein, Kohut, nor any other writer or thinker truly bear his allegiance, while all are subject to critical examination, particularly in terms of inconsistencies between theory and practice, and inconsistencies in theory building. Eagle's writing is brilliant, free of jargon, easily understood, even in chapters which are highly technical in terms of explication of issues such as metapsychology, instinct theory, etc. His book is carefully thought out in a way that I personally have not yet seen before.
In my opinion, its' relatively minor shortcomings may be placed in two categories, and perhaps are necessarily present: (1) Brevity. Let me note, however, that this relatively small volume is worth a five- or ten-volume work of “psychoanalese.” A number of important current modifiers of psychoanalytic theory for various reasons are not included or only noted briefly. I will comment on this later. (2) Harshness. In my opinion, little is noted about the very positive effects, to clinicians, of the work of self-psychology. It focuses analysts and psychoanalytically oriented clinicians (not self-psychologists alone) more keenly on both a theoretical understanding and appreciat