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These inaugural lectures were given by the distinguished holders of the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London, between 1975 to 1984, when the appointment was altered from an annual visiting professorship to a position of longer tenure. The editor of the volume, Joseph Sandler, first long-term holder of the chair, and responsible for two substantial contributions, suggests that the book provides ‘a sampling of a number of important trends in areas of current psychoanalytic interest’. The reader may, in Sandler's words, extract from these lectures ‘the common ground in different areas of psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the differences of approach, both explicit and implicit’ among the various authors.
The book as a whole is a convincing demonstration of the vitality of psychoanalysis, confirming that it is a live discipline in a state of continuous development and redefinition. It is sometimes helpful to be reminded when individual lectures were delivered. This information can be worked out from the foreword, but could usefully have been included with the contents or chapter headings. Since giving their lectures reprinted here, many of the authors, all pre-eminent in their field, have developed their ideas further or published them in a different or extended form. Consequently, several of the chapters may not seem as innovative now as they must have been for the original audience. In most cases, however, these particular presentations retain their value.
Some authors write in lucid style and are a pleasure to read, others must have been even more demanding to follow in the original lecture form. Several assume