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Contributors to a Festschrift often make special efforts to produce original and significant papers, hopefully trying to emulate the highest achievements or the unique approach of the man being honored. This volume drawn from the proceedings of the Symposium on Psychoanalysis held in Los Angeles in honor of Franz Alexander's seventieth birthday, offers little that measures up to the worthiest of Alexander's contributions. Each author seems to have contented himself with either a brief panegyric or a mildly contentious reworking of familiar material. Three papers, for example, are profiles of Alexander but they deal only superficially with the man and his career. Two studies by nonanalysts discuss the parallels between psychoanalysis and history (Meyerhoff) and the problem of evaluation of the results of psychotherapy (Strupp). Although the latter paper deals with familiar ideas it has the special merit of stressing methodology in its critique of the various studies in the literature.
The paper by Roy S. Grinker, Sr., does little to live up to its title, Psychoanalytic Theory and Psychosomatic Research, other than to point out the obvious need for understanding the interpenetrations of psychological, cultural, and biological factors in any given experience or response. In this paper, and in several of the others, small barbs are tossed (or heavy lances tilted) at 'psychoanalytic theory' which are obviously pertinent only to instances of methodological ignorance or technical sloppiness.
This type of sniping also discredits the papers of Edith Weigert and Leon Saul, which take up a few clinical and technical problems in a most casual and frequently redundant fashion. With simplistic zeal and Procrustean diligence they attempt to reduce all psychoanalysis to what they consider its essence, a 'technique of re-education', but their arguments fail to convince or impress, or even to appear novel.
A feature of the Anniversary Symposium seems to have been an extended pane