Personality Structure and Human Interaction. The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory: By Harry Guntrip, Ph.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1961. 456 pp.

This volume records an intense and sometimes embarrassing transference romance between its author and W. R. D. Fairbairn. As in all such affairs, outsiders are devaluated or seen as intruders, predominantly bad. As Guntrip might put it, opponents are 'antilibidinal forces' representing the 'rejecting object'. Naturally, Freud and his followers fit into this scheme or drama as the 'sadistic superego' persecuting the 'libidinal ego'. Obviously such 'persecutors' must be overthrown if the 'forces of progress' are to win the field. And indeed Guntrip casually discards drive theory (and in particular infantile sexuality); the structural hypothesis; the accepted understanding of the process of symptom-formation; and the Oedipus complex as a significant determinant of neurosis. Freud is seen as a giant shackled by his theory of instinctual drives and hence able only to elaborate an 'atomistic Helmholtzian psychology'. Guntrip takes a passing swipe at Glover for his concept of ego nuclei as also being atomistic and as missing the real significance of the primary unitary ego, 'the core of the personal self'.

It seems that in this romance the three musketeers, Klein, Fairbairn, and the author, have rescued ego psychology from its freudian slough of despond. Klein is the courageous but still naïve pioneer, braving the dangers of heresy to uncover the heretofore concealed secrets of object relations. However, because she believed in the death instinct, she erred in assuming that active aggressive forces in the infant operate primarily and are later projected onto