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In the two decades after World War II when psychoanalysis was at its height of popularity, several leading psychoanalysts wrote one volume surveys and textbooks of classical psychoanalysis which were widely read and well regarded by professional and lay readers alike. The works of Brenner, Fenichel, Hendrick, Kubie, Munroe, and Waelder come to mind as first rate contributions of this kind.
More recently such summaries have gone out of fashion except for encyclopedia articles such as this reviewer's contribution in Arieti and Meissner's essay in Freedman et. al.
Now Giovacchini has returned to the one volume survey format and has succeeded admirably in this endeavor. His book is a reasonably complete restatement of classical psychoanalysis which the author calls “standard psychoanalytic theory.” He follows the basic theoretical contributions of Freud as they evolved historically and been amended and expanded in recent decades. For Giovacchini the fields of ego psychology, self psychology, and object relations theory comprise the current frontiers of classical theory.
One felicitous feature of this book is the author's informal and discursive