Recollection and Reconstruction; Reconstruction in Psychoanalysis. (Monograph IV of the Kris Study Group of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.): Edited by Bernard D. Fine, M.D., Edward D. Joseph, M.D., and Herbert F. Waldhorn, M.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1971. 128 pp.

Monograph IV really comprises two interrelated monographs on reconstruction, based on the work of analytic study groups under the chairmanship of Rudolph Loewenstein. The first section is reported by Edward Joseph and Burness Moore, the second section by Jerome Ennis. The reports are meritorious in being both laconic and erudite. The discussions are on a high level of analytic thinking and sophistication, and are balanced with varied clinical material and illustrations. After a brief review of the literature, there is lucid consideration of a gamut of topics including the definition of reconstruction, the technique and effects of reconstruction, its relationship to memory and recall, the metapsychology of the process of reconstruction for both analyst and patient, the sense of conviction, the validity of reconstruction, and the roles of fantasy and reality as determinants of a reconstruction.

The scope and breadth of these topics are of great importance to both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. It would be impossible in one monograph to elucidate fully all these themes and to reconstruct the stimulation, challenge, and group synthetic function. There are brief but profound debates: for instance, over the importance of discrete traumatic organizing experiences in development versus the modification, patterning, and secondary elaborations to which genetic events are subjected. The reconstruction of a childhood event and situation, with its intrapsychic meaning and ramifications, would most often be gradual, tentative, and aimed at multiple developmental areas. The reviewer would also agree that it is important to distinguish between real trauma and fantasies. To reconstruct accurately such trauma and the links between pathogenic experience and subsequent psychopathology is a formidable analytic task. The problems of reconstruction of the 'shock' event versus the pathological pattern are left unresolved, for the reader's reflection. The spectrum o