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This book presents problems to a reviewer, not because of its contents or substance, but because of its title and wide chronological scope, which spans nearly four decades. Between its covers one finds, in chronological order, papers dating from the twenties and early thirties of this century as well as those published but two or three years ago.
Dr. Lampl-de Groot is an outstanding analyst with broad clinical experience derived from many years of practice in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, solid theoretical knowledge, and manifold professional interests. The volume offers a wealth of material for the reader whose attention is held throughout by the extensive information it provides and the straightforward, instructive nature of the contributions it contains. However, this is no systematic account of the development of the mind. Nor is it a textbook specifically concerned with maturational problems or purely developmental aspects of psychic functioning.
The trend in analytic literature these past several years has been toward the collection of papers by the same author on various psychoanalytic subjects. Lampl-de Groot offers papers (as her subtitle states) on clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic problems, and she aims 'to go further into the substructures of ego organization, into the different origins of the superego proper and the ego ideal, and into their influence on each other. Furthermore … to highlight some of the special events leading to the different forms of mental illness.' Although a certain number of the papers presented in this collection appear here in English for the first time and some have not been published before, a good many of the twenty-seven chapters of the book are reprinted and are readily available in their original versions. Some, indeed, have appeared in earlier collections, such as The Psychoanalytic Reader, the Yearbook of Psychoanalysis, Searchlights on Delinquency, and Drives, Affects, Behavior, Vol. I.
The author has pai