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The appearance of this posthumous book by one of the most erudite, witty, and thoughtful psychoanalytic authors of recent years has been warmly anticipated by his many admirers. Those who were hoping that Victor Rosen might have left a body of publishable work at his death in 1973 will be disappointed in this volume: in spite of the ambitious title, it actually consists of a selection of
Rosen's published productions, spanning the years from 1953 to 1974. In addition, there are commentaries about the man and his work by each of the co-editors as well as by one of Rosen's eminent students, Theodore Shapiro. As one should expect, his friends and colleagues remember him with affection and hold his contributions in the highest esteem.
Rosen's work was generally published in the major psychoanalytic journals, and regular readers of this literature will not discover new facets of his work in this collection. The task of reviewing the book therefore amounts to an assessment of the cumulative impact of the scientific activity of one creative personality in the field. I feel some diffidence about reviewing a man's work on the basis of a specific collection of his writings torn out of context. For instance, Rosen was extraordinarily active as a panelist at meetings of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations; thus many of his papers were written for particular occasions. In fulfilling these expository functions, he wrote elegantly and knowledgeably, but without much concern over repetition, and it is doubtful that he would have chosen to publish so many of these pieces simultaneously, as do the editors of this volume. His scientific interests were focused on a series of discrete problems, and these are roughly summarized in the title of this volume. The actual range of these fourteen papers crosses these arbitrary boundaries, however; Rosen's subject matter was not confined to these themes.
Victor Rosen was a product of the extraordinary intellectu