Dimensions of Psychoanalysis edited by Joseph Sandler Madison, CT:  International Universities Press, 1989,  xv + 263 pp., $35.00

The Freud Memorial Chair at the University of London has been held by eminent scholars in various disciplines. Dimensions of Psychoanalysis, edited and with an introduction by Joseph Sandler and published in honor of the chair's 25th anniversary, offers essays by former chairholders and guest lecturers. Several of the essays are disappointing as they seem to present ideas with which their authors have dealt with elsewhere. This is particularly true of the first essay, Roy Schafer's “The Psychoanalytic Life History.” Difficult to read, it is best perused along with his A New Language for Psychoanalysis (Schafer, 1976). As you read further however, and become aware of the diversity, indeed disagreements, among the writers, you realize this is data groping for a dialectic. There is a preconscious struggle for a dialectic that enlivens the psychoanalytic dimensions and dialogue.

Psychoanalysis is on the edge of a Hegelian reconstruction that is sometimes, unfortunately, embedded in its politics and economics as well as in its thesis and antithesis. There is a thrust not only toward integration of Kuhn's new science paradigm, but also toward several kinds of psychoanalyses, biologies, humanities, art, and cultural-political phenomena. The economics of the psychoanalytic enterprise, the clinical theories, and practices are in an expanding, sometimes very defensive role.

The essays deal with emerging theoretical and treatment interventions that involve primitive states, character structure, and the kinds of individuals and families that develop pathologies. Within these pages are reflections of a growing literature on classical drive theories, the self psychologies of the followers of Kohut, and the Kleinians and neo-Kleinians of the object relations school. Missing from the volume are essays on Lacan, psychoanalytic scholarship in the humanities, structuralism, deconstructionism,