Psychoanalysts Talk by Virginia Hunter New York:  Guilford Press, 1994,  xviii + 456 pp., $35.00

Reacting to what he regarded as Adler's and Jung's misleading use of the word psychoanalysis, Freud claimed proprietary rights to the psychoanalytic appellation. In his subjective 1914 exposition, “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” Freud testily declared, “[P]sychoanalysis is my creation….no one can know better than I do what psychoanalysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind and precisely what should be called psychoanalysis and what would better be described by some other name” (p. 7). In Psychoanalysts Talk Virginia Hunter presents her personal interviews with 11 eminent clinicians to whom she attributes the psychoanalytic appellation. She reports their answers to questions concerning their lives and careers and presents their responses to identical case material (a patient treated by Hunter). Given the striking differences in their reactions to the same case materials—their emphases, focus, goals for treatment, and conceptions of the nature of treatment—this volume begs the question, what is the contemporary meaning of the term psychoanalysis (and psychoanalyst) more than 50 years after the death of its creator? By what standard can one decide that today it is appropriate for the psychoanalytic appellation to be shared by those who might better be described by other names (e.g., ego psychologists, Kleinians, object relations theorists, self psychologists)?

Hunter argues that the essential elements of psychoanalytic practice are the analysis of the ego and understanding the unconscious, dreams, free associations, defenses, transference, and countertransference. She locates the major sources of difference in the approaches of psychoanalysts to the same case material in subjective factors, namely, an analyst's transference to theory (i.e., attachment to the theory associated with the psychoanalytic group with