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To those readers who are interested in abstract psychoanalytic theory it will seem that this book—like the weather in March—comes in with the roar of a lion but goes out with the harmless bleating of a lamb, quite an ethical and philosophical lamb at that. A complication of papers published between 1934 and 1947 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the papers are revised, extended, and rearranged, but the book is not forged into a unit; it shows gaps, breaks, numerous overlappings and repetitions. It fails to come to strong and creative conclusions and offers merely a social and ethical philosophy which not only could have been achieved without mobilizing psychoanalytic theory but does not even necessarily follow from it. This is really deplorable as there are many stimulating observations concerning current psychoanalytic theory which should be seriously considered by any analyst who feels the obligation to be more than a mere masseur of the soul.
The title of the book is misleading as the only trend in psychoanalysis which is treated thoroughly is the somewhat wild and dramatic theoretical presentation by Melanie Klein and her followers of her acute observations of children. These theoretical presentations have been for many years the headache of the London group of analysts. The first three chapters of the book, which contain its most unified part, represent the efforts of the author to bring some order into the discussion. To this purpose she gives in her first chapter a short survey of the historical development of psychoanalytic concepts and theory. In her second chapter she points out the fact that the initial considerations of affects in Freud's theory produced 'hypotheses [which] were framed in terms of ideas rendered dynamic by their emotional charges', describing 'conflict as conflict between ideas with incompatible feeling charges'. This ideomotor terminology, as the author calls it, and which she rightfully considers not only dynamic a