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'The custom of issuing volumes of "Selected Papers" during the lifetime of the author has no doubt many motivations in common with the practice of writing autobiographies, and, as in the case of an autobiography, can be justified only on the assumption that the author's remains are worth preserving. At first a sanguine belief shared by author and publisher, this sometimes naüve assumption must sooner or later be submitted to the public for judgment.'
So begins Dr. Glover's preface to his book, which is a collection of twenty-eight of his papers, published over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1924. Dr. Glover justifies their reprinting by the fact that the great majority of the papers are concerned with one aspect or another of the early development of the mind, since they deal with early developmental stages, early structural and functional aspects, and his noteworthy work on classification of normal and pathological manifestations on etiological and developmental bases. Moreover, in this collection Dr. Glover adds introductory paragraphs to each of the papers summarizing his present views on the status of the contribution. This addition is a noteworthy improvement on the usual type of collection of papers where the author does not trouble to indicate whether he has changed his mind, or whether he would now deal with the topic differently than he did in earlier years.
It was particularly interesting to the reviewer to find ideas and concepts in some of the papers published over thirty years ago which have been presented in relatively recent publications by other authors without due acknowledgment to Dr. Glover. A few examples which come to mind are his idea of the imprint of early libido and ego development upon later stages of character structure; the qualitative closeness of the defensive structures of the 'normal' to that in psychoses, drug addictions, or character disorders; and the approach to neuroses from the point of view of adaptation theory. The