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The accomplishment of the 37 authors in this book is truly impressive. The 38 chapters, grouped in seven parts, meet the editors' intent of providing cohesive and scholarly answers to what generations of students ask, “What is interpersonal psychoanalysis?” Its definition is “a broadly relational metapsychology; an interactive conception of the intrapsychic or intrapersonal world” (“Introduction to Interpersonal Psychoanalysis,” Marylou Lionells et al., chapter 1).
The Introduction to Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (chapter 1) indicates that up to the 1940s, the Cultural-Interpersonal school was assumed to be a brief corrective to the overzealous biologism of drive theory. Regrettably anger soon replaced tolerance, and the Culturalists then were looked on as if they were parasites.
Clara Thompson, who later became the first director of the William Alanson White Institute, had been one of the founders of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She defended Karen Horney's so-called deviant teachings. Being pilloried, she chose to resign from the American Psychoanalytic Association (“History of the Founders of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis,” Dale Ortmeyer, chapter 2). Or according to another version, she was expelled (“The Goals of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis,” Carola H. Mann, chapter 24).
The contributors to the Handbook place relevant contributions of interpersonal psychoanalysis side by side with the Freudian perspective, and compare the two. The editors then conclude that now “the different psychoanalytic schools have begun to overlap” (“Anxiety,” Margaret Crastnopol, chapter 6).
It is also noteworthy that the Interpersonalists have adopted some of the terminology coined by Freud, even if not fully sharing the meaning originality assigned to it. Readers of the Handbook will be helped in their assimilation of terms specific to the writings of some Interpersonalists by becoming acquainted with the Glossary of Interpersonal Concepts (Lawrence O. Brown) despite the obsolescen