The Languages of Psychoanalysis by John E. Gedo Hillsdale, NJ:  The Analytic Press, 1996,  xiii + 209 pp., $39.95

A broad constellation of concerns informs the author's purposes in this volume. Gedo's introduction articulates the need for filling the vacuum left by discarding Freudian metapsychology while at the same time, as he has emphasized elsewhere, “salvaging” as much as possible of “the Freudian paradigm of mental functioning” (Gedo, 1979, p. 164). Another concern is his intention to present a summary of his own clinical observations relating to what he calls “the languages of psychoanalysis.” He does so as part of his concern to generate “an ontogenetic map” based on his earlier, hierarchical model of psychological development. Still another concern of this book is the “buttressing” of psychoanalytic clinical observations with data from cognate fields, especially neurobiology. Finally, Gedo may be said to be concerned with warranting certain forms of psychoanalytic technique, especially those appropriate for dealing with archaic transferences.

Despite some implications in the title of Gedo's book and the title of Part I (Psychoanalysis and Semiotics), this work is not a systematic or academic discourse employing insights from such fields as semiotics and communication theory. Gedo simply uses such words as “semiotics” as convenient terms to cover a variety of clinically familiar phenomena, such as nonverbal communication, conversion symptoms, and what he refers to as “intrapsychic communication” (mentation). Rather than a true monograph—which is what Gedo claims he conceived the book as being (p. v)—the volume reads like a collection of more or less related pieces, sometimes partially redundant, on the subject of communication—most of them published in earlier versions as articles or presented as talks.

Although the chapters in Part I deal with familiar issues, Gedo brings to bear fresh and revealing illustrations from his practice, and a wealth of sound advice. He emphasizes that analysands are