You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The seventh volume of the Annual Survey contains abstracts of articles culled from twenty-eight journals, eight of them foreign. Each category summarizes the literature and emphasizes the direction and progress of psychoanalytic thought. A concluding summary offers a critical appraisal of the abstracts, providing a background for estimating their relative importance. There is hardly an article of major significance in psychoanalytic literature for the year 1956 that has been omitted. It is inevitable, however, that some prove to be of less value than others.
As the Survey is primarily a book of reference, shorter abstracts may be preferable to longer ones. The writing of abstracts is difficult at best and, as might be expected, the quality varies. By and large, however, a high level of excellence is maintained. Epitomes of nine books which are included could have been abbreviated. Of outstanding interest is the Section on History which is devoted to Freud's Centennial Celebrations. It includes Freud's influence on contemporary thought, biographical contributions, predecessors who influenced Freud and the evolution and the dissemination of psychoanalysis. The volume is worth owning for this feature alone.