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At present, there are two endowed chairs of psychoanalysis in the world, the Freud Professorships at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and at the University College (London). Perhaps it has not been possible to establish a similar position in an American university because in this country psychoanalysis has gradually narrowed to a clinical discipline, relegated to the back rooms of medical schools and training programs in psychology devoted to the production of practitioners.
I have been stimulated to express these bilious sentiments by the recent publication of the man who has held both Freud Professorships, Joseph Sandler. Dimensions of Psychoanalysis is a collection of Inaugural Lectures by the sequence of scholars who held the Freud chair in London while it was assigned to visiting dignitaries. It is remarkable that a substantial minority of the dozen lecturers chose non-clinical topics, and two Freud Professors were not professional psychoanalysts at all.
The selection of visiting professors was, of course, dictated by their availability for such an assignment: It causes no surprise that most of them practice psychoanalysis in London or Paris. By contrast, the four American participants were all academics on sabbatical leave. The invited British analysts represent the leadership of several factions within the London psychoanalytic community, but the French and the American visitors seem to have been chosen on a less adventuresome basis.
Although Sandler provides the volume with an excellent Introduction (where he expertly summarizes the thesis of each contribution), he fails to indicate whether the Lectures as published reflect the current thinking of the authors or their views at the time they were at University College. It is well