On Perception and Event Structure, and the Psychological Environment. Selected Papers: By Fritz Heider. Psychological Issues, Vol. I, No. 3, Monograph 3. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1959. 123 pp.

This third number of Psychological Issues is a remarkable work that deserves close study by those concerned with psychoanalytic theory. It comprises six papers by Fritz Heider on the nature of the psychological environment and an orientating introduction to these papers by the editor of the volume, George S. Klein. Heider, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas and for many years closely associated with the movement known as Gestalt psychology, addresses himself to the problem of how real objects are transformed into the material of psychologically real events. The first two papers consider the nature of objects, their structure, and their mediation by events and by other objects. Thing and Medium, written in 1926, and The Function of the Perceptual System, written in 1930, maintain a freshness and profundity that few psychological works can match. In the third paper, The Function of Economical Description in Perception, written for the present volume, Heider discusses the correspondence between the structure of objects and the tendency of the perceiver to 'strip away the redundancy of stimulation', that is, to interpret stimulus patterns in terms of the most economical description. It is this correspondence that achieves adaptive and veridical perceptual response. These first three papers provide a systematic guide for considering the riddle of adaptive reality contact in the face of drive cathexis of perceptions.

The fourth paper, Environmental Determinants in Psychological