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For many years now the Jahrbuch has brought to the German speaking reader major essays from the world's leading psychoanalysts. This volume, like its predecessors, continues to present quality psychoanalytic contributions concerned with important topics. The authors
presented are well-known psychoanalysts from Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. They give this book an international flavor, and they acquaint the reader with some of the diverse directions into which psychoanalytic inquiry has moved while maintaining a core psychoanalytic identity.
The eight papers are divided into four sections: theoretical contributions (A. Limentani, D. Chianese, B. Barth, H. Harsch); a clinical contribution (L. Wurmser); applied psychoanalysis (P. Dettmering, E. Haas); and a biographical contribution about Freud (E. Garcia).
Limentani's chapter, "Aggression, Sexuality and the Death Instinct," gives an overview of the development of the psychoanalytic theories as conceptualized primarily by Freud and by M. Klein. He holds Freud's views as presented in the 1915 essay, "Instincts and their Vicissitudes," as still being of great significance for psychoanalysis. Analysts were ill prepared to deal with Freud's introduction in the 1920's of his revolutionary concept of a dichotomy between Eros and Thanatos. It gave the repetition compulsion greater prominence than the pleasure principle. The new theory was not acceptable to many psychoanalysts, although it found clinical support in making the negative therapeutic reaction explainable. Further modifications were inevitable in order to come to grips with the role of the environment and found their expression in object relations theory. Comparing Freudian and Kleinian approaches to describing the interplay of libido and aggression, Limentani seems more attracted to the Kleinian view but is critical of both. He faults all psychoanalytic theorizing as centered too much on pathology and lacking in understandi