Evolution of Psychoanalysis: John Gedo,  Other Press, New York, 1999,  246 pp., $25.00.

John Gedo's book, Evolution of Psychoanalysis, is a survey and critique of psychoanalytic literature of the last twenty-five years, more specifically from 1973 to 1998. The intent is to inform the psychoanalytic community of diverse new trends in the field, but the impetus for writing it belongs in a larger context. Gedo believes that psychoanalysis is in the middle of a veritable metamorphosis. He writes: “The vanguard of our profession has in the last quarter century altered psychoanalysis as drastically as chemistry was transformed from the molecular to the atomic level of conceptualization” (p. 221). Most practitioners, however, remain unaware of these happenings and do not realize the conceptual changes that set them in motion. They have responded to the conceptual disarray in the field by adhering to the school of thought of their training institutes and by closing their minds to the “noise” of divergent trends. The author sees an urgent need to inform and enlighten. The survey highlights the existence of two divergent trends. One trend wishes to maintain and consolidate the place of psychoanalysis within the natural sciences. Freud's tentative biological propositions of his metapsychology have proven to be untenable, but recent neurobiological data are available to create a new biological foundation that can be validated by other disciplines. The other trend places psychoanalysis into the philosophic hermeneutic tradition, giving only lip service to its neurobiological underpinnings.

The author selected sixty of what he judged to be the most significant books of this period that have added new perspectives to the field. He excluded his own books, the most important of which is Models of the Mind, coauthored with A. Goldberg which appeared in 1973, at the beginning of the period he is surveying. His books are excluded only on the grounds that he cannot be an impartial critic of his own writing. He certainly believes that his contributions are significant and be