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This second collection of Rado's papers consists of twenty contributions varying from general theoretical discussions such as Observations on the Development of Psychoanalytic Theory (1960) to more specific clinical papers dealing with subjects such as drug addiction, obsessive behavior, masochism, and sexual anesthesia in the female.
As culled from these papers Rado's concept of psychic life is that the action-self (roughly corresponding to the ego) is engaged in an adaptive struggle for existence with the outside world. This adaptive struggle is on the basis of the pleasure principle—'the organism moves toward the source of pleasure (reward) and away from the source of pain (punishment)' (p. 44). This basic and primal pattern of behavior is called by Rado the hedonic unit or basic pattern of hedonic self-regulation. By learning and maturation the organism can substitute delayed reward for immediate reward. This is accomplished by a hierarchy of types of responses. A second stage following hedonic self-regulation consists of emotional responses such as desire, affection, joy, and self-respect, and emergency emotions such as fear, rage, and guilty fear. these emotional responses, like the preceding hedonic self-regulations, are innate forms of behavior based upon neurophysiologically pre-existent substrates. Higher units of such integrative apparatuses are emotional thought and, lastly, unemotional (impartial) thought. The self has also a hierarchy of organizations. The primordial self, in its pursuit of the hedonic goal, pictures itself as omnipotent and strives for constant aggrandizement. As the organism grows this original nucleus is modified to form the tested self which now strives for a more or less realistic system of self-government rather than for omnipotent magical goals. It is in this adaptive struggle that pathological states may enter: 'If in the adaptive struggle for existence self-government fails, the organism may seek to strengthen its t