Psychoanalysis. The Major Concepts. Edited by Burness E. Moore, M.D. and Bernard D. Fine, M.D.; Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. Edited by Burness E. Moore, M.D. and Bernard D. Fine, M.D.: Psychoanalysis. The Major Concepts. Edited by Burness E. Moore, M.D. and Bernard D. Fine, M.D.New Haven/London:  Yale University Press, 1995. 577 pp.
Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. Edited by Burness E. Moore, M.D. and Bernard D. Fine, M.D. New Haven/London:  The American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990. 210 pp.

This review will focus on the “companion volume” Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts, published in 1995 as a supplement to the 1990 Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, itself an enlargement of the Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts first published in 1966. The “major concepts” book was planned to “provide a more comprehensive discussion of subjects of central importance in psychoanalysis including its applications, technical aspects, clinical phenomena, and more general theoretical concepts” (p. xii). After slowly and painstakingly reading this entire volume, I can vouch for its success in this intention. It is meant to serve as “an introduction to modern-day psychoanalysis for beginning students and as a review and up-dating of the fundamental theories of psychoanalysis for the more sophisticated” (p. xii). A third aim is to provide a “systematic consensus regarding the scientific basis of psychoanalysis that will raise questions for future research” (p. xii). They comment that a critical overview of our entire theoretical infrastructure is a necessary preliminary to revision. Of these aims, the book is most successful, in fact quite good, in serving as a review and update for the sophisticated. With some exceptions, it is too difficult and complex to serve as an introduction to modern psychoanalysis for beginning students, and while it raised questions and controversies for future research, the idea that this represents a systematic consensus was far from my mind. In fact, in some ways I found the book to be unsystematic.

The preface indicates that it represents “traditional main stream psychoanalysis” (early 1990's) in which “ego psychology or modern structural theory with some admixture of object relations theory and Mahler's developmental theory” represents the perspectives of the editorial board and chapter authors. I quote from the preface because in reading this collection of essays by different authors I found it hard to define what this bo