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This is quite a good book, with a focus on many varied senses of the “primitive,” and with many potential rewards for the modern psychoanalytic reader. While Bion, Klein, and their followers are particularly significant presences in this work, attention is given to other points of view as well, including the Kohutian and the object rationalist. As the first volume in a projected series devoted to the study of primitive mental states, this book represents a significant first step and deserves a serious reading. It represents also the theoretical, clinical, and educational commitments of the Psychoanalytic Center of California, which has endorsed the project, although it assumes no administrative responsibility for it. The principal editors and a fair number of the authors in this volume are either members of that institute or are in some way related to it, and the study itself evidently embodies its eclectic orientation. The overall philosophy of the Psychoanalytic Center of California resembes in several ways that of modern psychoanalytic institutes. It is committed to training candidates from a wide range