Personal Relations Therapy: The Collected Papers of H. J. S. Guntrip edited by Jeremy Hazell Northvale, NJ:  Jason Aronson, 1994,  xiii + 430 pp., $35.00. The Autonomous Self: The Work of John D. Sutherland edited by Jill Savege Scharff Northvale, NJ:  Jason Aronson, 1994,  xxv + 454 pp., $40.00.

Both of the volumes under review mark the beginning and trace the development of the opinion, by now dominant in psychoanalytic theory and practice, that (to paraphrase Pope) the proper study of mankind is people—and their relationships to each other—as distinct from studying the presumed effects of the individual's internal “drives.” The relational approach entails a theory of “self,” a term appearing in the title of two books by Guntrip and the one under review by Sutherland. Despite minor contradictions resulting from lingering entanglements with the vocabulary of earlier conceptions, both Guntrip and Sutherland represent the self as a virtual whole.

Their holistic perspective on selfhood might, for illustrative purposes, be contrasted to the more pluralistic idea of the “modular person,” a concept invented by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler that Garry Wills (1995) recently applied to one of their “disciples,” Newt Gingrich. According to Wills, a modular person is “an assemblage of ‘modules’ to be adapted, tried out, rejected, recombined in a constant adaption to new surroundings” (p. 4) in our fast-changing world. A miracle of versatility but lacking any permanent identity, he appears to be a throwback to Dryden's Zimri (a character in “Absalom and Achitophel”):

In contrast, Guntrip maintains that “the baby starts life as a whole psychic self…” (, p. 92), essentially a permanent self, however