Ego and Instinct. The Psychoanalytic View of Human Nature—Revised: By Daniel Yankelovich and William Barrett. New York: Random House, 1970. 494 pp.

This is an important book which psychoanalysts must debate intensively. It raises more questions than it answers, but the questions may lead to better answers to a number of basic problems. It is a good volume on which to base a fourth year seminar at a psychoanalytic institute on the conceptual and philosophical underpinning of psychoanalysis.

Ego and Instinct is the result of the collaboration of a social psychologist active in motivation research and a philosopher. The level of information and sophistication is very high. In the foreword the authors acknowledge their indebtedness to exchanges with a group of Boston psychoanalysts. As an account of Freud's basic conceptions, the first five chapters can hardly be surpassed in clarity of perception and statement. Most of the second part—the next five chapters—on Hartmann and Erikson are still exciting reading. Part Three, endeavoring a new philosophical start, Part Four, concerned with reconstruction, and chapter twenty-two, Beyond Psychoanalysis, are, to this reviewer, less successful.

Some of the authors' eventual difficulties are foreshadowed in the earlier part of the book when they seem to be preoccupied with the 'autonomy of the ego' rather than with the relatively autonomous characteristics of certain ego functions.1 One can't really blame anybody too much for such a misconception because autonomy is one of the poorly defined concepts. It means, as I understand it: a, that certain functions are congenitally present in lesser or greater extent (e.g., intelligence, motor dexterity) and are not (primarily) the derivative of instincts; b, the customary use of 'autonomous' also implies that intelligence, motor functioning, etc., play their role relatively unaffected by drives in the well-functioning person; and c, the third meaning of autonomous was best stated, even for psychoanalytic use, by Allport2 as the (secondary) functional autonomy of a motive (from its original drive source).