You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this compact volume, Clifford Yorke, Stanley Wiseberg, and Thomas Freeman attempt to provide a concise guide to applying psychoanalytic metapsychology and observations from psychoanalytic work with children to understanding psychopathology. Each author has worked closely with Anna Freud and at the Anna Freud Centre in England. The book culminates work they began in 1977. They aspire to construct a sound psychologic paradigm for psychiatrists, a centerpiece in what American psychiatrists commonly label their biopsychosocial perspective. However, the psychiatrist reader must not only be “prepared” as Albert Solnit suggests on the book jacket, but even expert in psychoanalytic metapsychology and probably convinced in advance of its special value.
Upholding their own approach as needed for truly explaining the phenomena, the authors summarily dismiss modern critiques of metapsychology. To me, such an assertion would require more validation of the existence of psychic structures and energy than the inferences from clinical data on which they are based. However, insofar as the notions of structures, drive energies, and cathexes help us step back from clinical observations and grasp aspects of function and its change, we can use them, as these authors do, to aid evaluation and the treatment that follows.
The first chapter, discussing anxiety, signal anxiety, and panic outlines a developmental line for anxiety from vegetative excitation through automatic anxiety and pervasive anxiety to signal anxiety. Through this example, the authors sketch out a central aspect of ego development and the relationship of the ego to id, superego, and environment. How the ego deals with anxiety is central to psychopathology. Anna Freud herself wrote the theoretical section for the second