From the days when Wundt and Freud were providing the originative impulse for their respective disciplines, the areas of experimental and clinical psychology and the field of psychoanalysis have gone their separate ways and have created few opportunities to fashion meaningful dialogues. There have, of course, been exceptions: one can think immediately of such outstanding figures as David Rapaport, the late George Klein, Robert Holt, Roy Schafer, and others. Beyond these creative few, however, the tendency of the empirical sciences of behavior to go their own way has remained the rule while psychoanalysis has tended to concern itself more or less exclusively with its basic clinical preoccupations. The dialogue remains pitifully thin and trivial, basically antithetical, and even at times hostile.

This book, by an outstanding English psychologist who has a firm grasp on psychoanalytic concepts and their meaning, provides a tidy account of the development of Freud's thinking as he struggled in his own way with some of the basic dilemmas that presented themselves