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Dr. Bruch presents many observations to demonstrate that people show great differences in the accuracy of recognizing and conceptualizing bodily needs. For example, obess subjects are affected by external cues such as the sight of food, its availability, and apparent passage of time, whereas subjects of normal weight eat according to enteroceptive determinants. Building on such data, the author provides a great deal of support for the assumption that seemingly innate functions require learning experiences early in life. Discriminating awareness of hunger itself is not felt to be present at birth, but develops, accurately or distortedly, through reciprocal transactional feedback patterns of experience. Feeding in the human infant always demands the coöperation of another person. Dr. Bruch feels that failure of a regular and persistent appropriate response to his needs deprives the developing child of the essential groundwork for his 'body identity' with discriminating perceptual and conceptual awareness of his own functions. Extensive neurophysiological data are referred to in support of the thesis from the biological side. In relating her thesis to Freud's conception of instinct, she states that his ideas of fixation, repression of, or regression to a pre-existing instinct can now be formulated as deformed organization of the functional potential because of inconsistent learning, or as functioning on different levels of neurophysiological integration of the central nervous system.