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A group of colleagues at my college have been developing an innovative general education course in the humanities geared for first-year students, including a unit on Freud. They consulted me about this; and guided by the principle “less is more,” the readings now include Freud's Introductory Lectures (the sections on errors and dreams only) and a case study, plus a few other items. The idea is to choose a small number of rich, dense texts and examine them thoroughly, with emphasis on varying views of them. This method has worked better than earlier enthusiasms and trying to read as much as possible in the shortest possible time. After all, there is the sophomore year. I imagine that Fogel's organizing principle in this volume must have been much the same. The book is both less than and far more than the usual edited volume.
“Less than” in that we have here not a comprehensive collection of all of Loewald, including unpublished essays, presented papers, some letters, and so on. After all, most of his important works are already collected (Loewald, 1980). Rather, this volume is a thoughtfully organized collection of the essence of Loewald; three important papers, along with helpful, and at times provocative commentary by Fogel and others. About half the book is devoted to Loewald's most important paper, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” and commentaries by Arnold Cooper, Roy Schafer, and Lawrence Friedman. These relatively brief essays focus on a reassessment of the paper, but range beyond it to address other aspects of Loewald's thought. The remainder of the book, at Loewald's own request, reprints his “Superego and Time” and “Psychoanalysis as an Art and the Fantasy Character of the Psychoanalytic Situation”; each is introduced by Fogel, who concludes with a major integrative essay ranging over all Loewald's work.