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“Give me different mothers, and I will give you a different world,” so said St. Augustine some 2,000 years ago in his Confessions. Freud was of a different opinion. Near the end of his life, and as attached as ever to his Lamarckian and Haeckelian biology, Freud (1940) wrote, regarding the mother's importance to her child, “In all of this the phylogenetic foundation has so much the upper hand over personal accidental experience that it makes no difference whether a child has really sucked at the breast or has been brought up on the bottle and never enjoyed the tenderness of a mother's care” (p. 188). Why the bottle and a mother's care should necessarily have been seen as mutually exclusive is not clear, but the direction of Freud's theorizing is certainly obvious enough. The volume under review, a memorial to the early generations of William Alanson White Institute interpersonalists, consists of 14 essays, previously published, that offer a radical reworking of Freud's biological paradigm, and specifically his instinct theory, the cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Interpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations theory, and self psychology these days are schools of thought generally accepted under the psychoanalytic umbrella, although even today there seems some confusion as to just how radically different these theories are from Freud's. Instead, they are often considered to be consistent