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This volume concerns itself with an area of psychoanalytic theory that has been relatively neglected in the current era of interest in ego psychology. Its author has himself written extensively on the topic of anxiety from the point of view of the ego, as well as on other aspects of metapsychology. Here he has set himself the task of supplying and remedying the lacks in the recent psychoanalytic
literature. The volume deals with a variety of topics in psychoanalytic theory (metapsychology), all of which are related more or less directly to the instinctual drives. Among the topics discussed are the mental representatives of the drives, the primary process as a mode of mental functioning, the pleasure-unpleasure principle, and the repetition compulsion. The two major chapters are on the primary process and repetition compulsion; other topics are dealt with in a series of very brief chapters.
Schur has followed Rapaport and Gill in defining metapsychology as a synthesis of five 'points of view': dynamic, structural, adaptive, genetic, and economic. Since in the monograph itself such stress has been laid on this terminology and on this way of conceptualizing what is meant by 'metapsychology', it seems worth noting that they are not as yet universally accepted by psychoanalysts. For example, Arlow and the reviewer used the term 'structural' to refer to the whole area of psychoanalytic theory (metapsychology),1 which Rapaport and Gill preferred to divide into five areas, of which the word 'structural' refers to only one. Thus the same word, 'structural', has a rather different meaning in the works of different authors. Schur's failure to take account of this fact has involved him in some polemics which seem unnecessary. It might be added that the schema used by Rapaport and Gill, which proposes to subsume all of psychoanalytic theory (metapsychology) under five points of view, omits one of the most important features of mental functioning according to psychoan