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Every few years conscientious editors round up psychoanalytic researchers and persuade them to summarize the latest developments in their work. Personally, I like this arrangement. For one thing, the product is a volume that contains everything in one place, making it handy for review, conceptual comparisons, and use in teaching. For another, editors vary, so there's a pleasant diversity of formats, choices, and slants.
This latest entry has several additionally appealing features: The editors, Theodore Shapiro and Robert N. Emde, have unimpeachable credentials, they are scholarly advocates of research and lively and articulate voices in analytic discourse. The substantial corpus of Emde's own research in life-span development bespeaks a general who knows about life in the trenches. The book is organized in three sections: “Research on the Process,” “Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology,” and “Outcome Studies,” with an epilogue by Emde. The editors have added the voices of “clinical scientist” discussants at the end of each section “to bridge the impact of the work on practicing psychoanalysts” (p. 2). It is a felicitous idea since many of these alleged bystanders are themselves formidable contributors to the literature of psychoanalytic research, for example, Spence and Galatzer-Levy.
Before going further, I should perhaps remind unsuspecting readers of this review that my somewhat dour convictions about the way organized psychoanalysis and most working analysts deal with the issues of research are a matter of record (Zabarenko, 1979). To date, there has seemed little reason to change these dim views. The editors of this volume console us that “investigations … will keep the clinicians' work alive. The science