Psychoanalysis: The Vital Issues—Volumes I and II. Edited by John E. Gedo and George H. Pollock: New York:  International Universities Press, 1984.

Psychoanalysis as an Intellectual Discipline is the first of two volumes containing the proceedings of the conference in 1981 on “The Vital Issues” that commemorated fifty years of organized psychoanalysis in Chicago. The book covers four aspects of psychoanalysis as an intellectual discipline. Part 1 on the origin of motivation deals with its roots in neurobiology, with developmental psychology and with the complex question of the use of data from infant observation. The problem of interdisciplinary collaboration is considered in the second part with examples presented from social science. Part 3 focuses on creativity and the course of human life. The epistemology of psychoanalysis is the subject of the final part. The authors include humanist-scholars David Bevington, Mark Schwehn and Mary Gedo and social scientists Donald Levine, Melford Spiro and Waud Kracke together with psychoanalytic thinkers Michael Basch, David Freedman, Mark Gehrie, Arnold Goldberg, William Grossman, Joseph Lichtenberg, George Moraitis, Henri Parens, Barbara Rocah, Leo Sadow, Samuel Weiss and the editors, John Gedo and George Pollock.

Volume II, Clinical Psychoanalysis and Its Applications, explores unsolved problems in the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, both in and outside of the therapeutic setting. Five sections deal with logically related topics—Transference and Countertransference, Self Psychology and its Alternatives, Outcome Studies, Theoretical Problems and Applications in the Literary Realm. An epilogue recounts the history of psychoanalysis in Chicago. The authors include Jacob