In the Name of Life. Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm: Edited by Bernard Landis and Edward S. Tauber. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1971. 333 pp.

This Festschrift dedicated to Erich Fromm on the occasion of his seventieth anniversary is rich in content. It consists of twenty-four contributions representing various countries and disciplines, most of them relevant to Fromm's own work and reflecting his development from sociology toward psychoanalysis and the reverse trend, with wide excursions into the humanities.

The first part, contributions on psychoanalysis, contains papers by some well-known and some less known authors. Otto Allen Will deals with the uniqueness of the relationship between the patient and the psychotherapist. Harry Guntrip, in On the Promise of Psychoanalysis, extols the 'new' psychoanalysis, as represented by the English school and Fromm, which has transcended Freud's 'mechanistic concepts' and the relevance of instinctual drives. This 'new' psychoanalysis is concerned with human relatedness and the development of the total human potential. He writes: 'The work of Fromm, Winnicott, Fairbairn, and Balint illustrates the way psychoanalysis is now in process of transformation from a theory and analysis of instinctual frustration and control into a theory and therapy that encourages the rebirth and growth of an authentic self within an authentic relationship'. According to Guntrip, reformed psychoanalysis 'that is not parochial, that addresses itself to the human condition is here to stay'. However, psychoanalysis will decline 'if it becomes a closed society of the initiated defending an older, underdeveloping theory as dogma'.

In another essay Ervin Singer discusses the ways in which 'the patient aids the analyst'. The author questions one of the requirements of freudian psychoanalysis, namely strict anonymity. His statement that 'unbending anonymity … does not promote and activate reality-oriented and constructive phantasies' is questionable. It is even more so in the light of his clinical illustration. His argument that the 'traditional analytic relationship' reflects the lack of