Psychoanalysis and its Discontents: By John E. Gedo, M.D. New York/London: The Guilford Press, 1984. 209 pp.

This, the sixth in a sequence of books1 that John Gedo has authored (in two instances, with co-authors), he regards as the capstone to his edifice, the completion of his cycle of work, over the course of which he has "attempted to survey anew the major themes of psychoanalytic discourse" (Discontents, p. ix),2 an ambitious claim which he is fully justified in advancing. His declared effort in all of this is to create a new, better ordered, more coherent, and more comprehensive clinical theory for psychoanalysis, although he seems uncertain of the degree to which this becomes a commitment to an equally revised metapsychology, as I, for one, think that in his case it does. On the latter issue he has said, for example when responding to a group of critical essays evaluating his book, Beyond Interpretation,3 that that book focused on matters of specific psychoanalytic expertise which are "embodied in a unified and inclusive clinical theory. The clinical theory is, in turn, designed to articulate with a metapsychology based on