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The joint authors of this lucid book studied the life and works of Rank, Reich, Jung and Freud, publishing their studies in that order in psychoanalytic journals. They were concerned with the subjectivity of metapsychology and of theories of personality. The book consists of somewhat modified versions of the articles, with introductory and concluding chapters presenting their general thesis, offering critiques and implications for diagnosis, therapy and research. Important areas of the inner experiential worlds of those major personality theorists are shown to have determined and coloured their concepts, hypotheses and ways of working.
Analytical psychology does not often get such an accolade for the perceptiveness of Jung as these authors give, early on in their book. The first important section of the first chapter, with the subtitle of ‘The observer is the observed’, is an expansion of Jung's statement which they quote, that ‘the psyche, being the object of scientific observation and judgment, is at the same time its subject, the means by which you make such observations’, a remark he made in the Tavistock Lectures. He also said on that occasion (which they do not quote): ‘The time for general theories is not yet ripe’. The book is a very sober version of The emperor's new clothes. All analysts (as Jung knew) would do well to keep an ear cocked for the iconoclastic remarks of the ‘enfant terrible’: and also to remember that that small boy was riding on his father's shoulders.
Stolorow and Atwood assume throughout that there is a ‘science of human personality’. It is not clear whether there is—yet. They believe that if that science is to achieve a greater degree of consensus and generality, it should do so by working on what they call ‘psychobiography’. That should not be a mere exposure of weaknesses, inconsistencies, shadow problems, distortions, unassimilated traumata, unworked-through mourning, and inadequately sublimated disillusions, in the lives and works of