The Essential Other: A Developmental Psychology of the Self by Robert M. Galatzer-Levy and Bertram J. Cohler New York:  BasicBooks/HarperCollins, 1993,  xi + 468 pp., $45.00

Galatzer-Levy and Cohler's The Essential Other should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the myriad ways that psychoanalytic ideas have been—and can be—used to construct and refine theories of the self and its development. Although this volume reviews in detail the central ideas and concepts which underlie classical psychoanalysis, object relations theory, and self psychology, The Essential Other transcends these earlier models. This is, in many respects, a landmark book. It is the strongest, best-informed and most well-articulated integration of psychoanalysis and developmental psychology to date.

The authors of The Essential Other have undertaken two ambitious tasks simultaneously, and by and large they succeed in both areas. First and foremost, Galatzer-Levy and Cohler seek to apply psychoanalytic ideas and findings to the study of developmental issues, especially insofar as these issues have implications for understanding the evolution of the self across the life span. Thus, in chapter 1 the authors write:

This book explores what we currently know about the development of relations to people throughout life and how these relations influence development throughout life. We believe that a great many findings are usefully organized around the idea of the essential other. The essential other is our experience of other people and entities in the environment that supports the sense of a coherent and vigorous self and its development. The essential other refers to an experience in the psychological life of the individual, not to the external reality of those people. We believe that the support of the self is always part of a total experience of other people and entities. This function is never isolated from the additional meanings these others have. (p. 3)

A second (and secondary) goal of this book is to use empirical data to evaluate and refine psychoanalytic ideas. Although