Psychoanalysis, the Science of Mental Conflict, Essays in Honor of Charles Brenner: edited by Arnold D. Richards and Martin S. Willick,  The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1986,  493 pp., $45.95.

This Festschrift for Charles Brenner, completed within two years of his seventieth birthday in November 1984, is in the best tradition of such an enterprise: a collection of highly original contributions which are based upon seminal work of Brenner, one of the outstanding psychoanalysts of our time.

In his introduction, Arnold Richards outlines the purpose of the book by giving an excellent summary of the work of Brenner, the “classical” analyst, a conservative who believes in progress. Based on Brenner's textbooks and papers, Richards clearly delineates Brenner's radical disjunction from psychoanalysts like George Klein, Kohut, Gedo, Rapaport and Gill, Waelder, Greenson and the Kleinians. Richards shows that for Brenner the pleasure principle and “extrospection” of the natural scientist, metapsychology as a bridge connecting the unconscious biological and the conscious psychological, as well as psychic energy remain central. According to Brenner, drives are impersonal and general, drive derivatives general and specific. Drive theory includes both. Defense “mechanisms” simply do not exist. Further on, mental conflict is a sina qua non of structural theory itself and the leitmotif of Brenner's work.

The second cornerstone of Brenner's work is compromise formation in terms of the components of conflict, affect, stage, defenses, self-punitive trends due to superego functioning, drive derivatives, also including dreams, transference, and countertransference. Charles Brenner himself sums it up in his own short chapter: “Everything in psychic life with which one has to deal as an analyst is a compromise formation … Conflict and compromise formation are as significant a part of normal, human, psychic functioning and development as they are of psychopathology.” This very broad view of Charles Brenner is reflected in his neurological career with contributions to neurology, neurosurgery and neurophysiology, as shown by Carl Braun.

The bulk of the book consists of six areas: the