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This second volume of an important new venture happily maintains the high level of scholarly research that typified the papers in the first volume. The twenty papers are arranged in eight sections: psychoanalytic history, psychoanalysis and philosophy, clinical theory, developmental psychology, clinical psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary research, psychoanalytic education, and application. One expects mixed quality in such a diverse grouping of topics and authors, but the editors have done their job well here. Not only are most of the papers interesting; half of them are superior, and a few are truly outstanding.
The historical section begins with a fascinating paper by Meyer S. Gunther and H. Trosman describing Freud's expert testimony on war neuroses at a hearing conducted in 1920 by the Austrian government. Wagner-Jauregg also testified at this hearing, and we are given a beautiful example here of Freud's incisive wisdom and exquisite tactfulness.
M. Grotjahn's paper is another excellent historical report, which concerns the Rundbriefe that circulated among the "Committee of the Six Ringholders" between 1920 and 1924. Carl Schorske's scholarly "Politics and Parricide in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams," the plenary address to the American Psychoanalytic Association in December 1971, is included here in expanded form.
We are indebted to the editors for their decision to publish in English a critique of the repetition compulsion and death instinct written forty years ago by Heinz Lichtenstein and translated for this volume by the author.
Leo Stone's paper, "The Assessment of Students' Progress," is a superb distillate of this gifted psychoanalytic educator's thoughts about the current state of psychoanalytic education and his ideas about key reforms in student assessment, desirable qualities in the young analyst, lessening of academic rigidities, and other issues.