Perspectives in Psychological Theory. Essays in Honor of Heinz Werner: Edited by Bernard Kaplan and Seymour Wapner. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1960. 384 pp.

'Good music is music played by good musicians',—a definition applicable to this book, for its authors are good musicians of their science. Eighteen of them present these fourteen essays as an honor to Heinz Werner, by whose comparative-developmental approach to behavior all have been affected. The air of pleasant enthusiasm and affection for Dr. Werner gives a festive spirit to this Festschrift.

One would expect among so many essays by so many authors to find some unevenness, but all the contributions are scholarly and some are brilliant. Expositions and definitions of philosophical problems, experimental propositions, and theoretical thinking are supported by careful, and sometimes Talmudic, argument. It is interesting to find that even though the authors include psychiatrists, comparative, social, and research psychologists, a linguist, and a psychoanalyst, the semantic operations peculiar to each discipline seem easily translatable from one to the other, so that coherence is for the most part maintained throughout. If there is a weakness, it lies in the attempts to quantify psychological data, attempts usually fraught with theoretical dangers.

The one essay by a psychoanalyst, David Rapaport's Psychoanalysis