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Robert Langs's two massive volumes are the most remarkable that have been produced from the pen of a classical psychoanalyst for many years. They represent the labours of a man who has had the time and the capacity to study, reflect upon and synthesise the literature on the psychoanalytic situation from Freud's essays at the beginning of the century up to 1976.
The scope of the inquiry is wide. This may be illustrated by the fact that up to now Kleinian innovations have mostly been given scant, and destructive, critical attention in the United States—Jungians have been ignored. Langs considers the Kleinian literature sympathetically and at length and mention is made of two Jungian authors: Plaut and myself.
The conclusions are astonishingly in line with many of Jung's formulations, as I shall show later on in this review. This made me sad. Despite the fact that a handful of analytical psychologists have embarked on the attempt to develop Jung's ideas in this area, the result is puny, compared with what is collected together here. It seemed as if we had squandered our birthright.
The two volumes are essentially different. The first contains abstracts of some five hundred papers. They are well made and, as far as I could assess them, they grasp accurately the main points in each author's contribution; no doubt for reasons of space no clinical material is included. Volume II contains Langs's reflections and synthesis on the basis of his own views. My following assessment of his work will be made on my reading of Volume II, in which the analytic stiuation is viewed from a number of different angles. There is, inevitably, a great deal of repetition and, as with much American psychoanalytic literature, it is wordy; but I never found it dull. It has to be read slowly and, in the case of Volume I, I found it profitable to refer from time to time to the original paper that was being abstracted. I do not pretend to have digested more than a fragment of its con