The Hampstead Psychoanalytic Index. A Study of the Psychoanalytic Case Materials of a Two-Year-Old Child: By John Bolland, M.D. and Joseph Sandler, Ph.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1965. 203 pp.

This is the first of the monograph series of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and consists of two parts: weekly reports of the analysis of a two-and-a-half-year-old child, and the indexing of this psychoanalytic material according to the present framework of the by now renowned Hampstead Index. A complete picture of a case and the indexing procedure has been long awaited, and psychoanalysts will welcome this model for the organization and presentation of psychoanalytic material.

As noted in the introduction, the impetus for the research project that brought forth the Index was the one known so well to clinical research teams, namely what to do with the records and how to make the keeping of detailed records meaningful for therapists. The resultant Index is much more than might be the suggested analogy to the index of a book. The clinical material is organized in outline form with topics and subtopics. The source of these headings comes from psychoanalytic clinical description and psychoanalytic clinical theory most relevant to the practicing therapist; i.e., fantasies, symptoms, instinctual derivatives, defenses, treatment situation and technique, etc. Each topic heading is given a very precise definition. For example: 'Denial is regarded as the refusal to acknowledge unpleasant reality, external or internal. Denial is distinguished from repression in that what is predominant is a withdrawal of attention cathexis from the unpleasant reality while in repression this is reinforced by anti-cathexis.' Refinements in the delineation of certain less well-known defense mechanisms, such as reversal of roles and reversal of affect, the latter with such prestages as denigrating the love object and in permanent form becoming reaction-formation, are very useful. As pointed out by Anna Freud, a general acceptance of this outline could well result in a 'collective analytic memory' which would allow for the comparison of clinical material from many sources that has