The Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis: A View of the Contributions of Donald Spence, Roy Schafer, Robert Stolorow, Irwin Z. Hoffman, and Beyond: Richard Moore, Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1999, 200 pp., $34.50.

In a philosophy course I took as an undergraduate, a student asked the professor to describe Plato's view of reality. After remarking briefly on the Theory of the Forms, the professor began to shuffle some papers on his desk, looked rapidly from one side of the room to the other, then said that the idea of “reality” is a very complex philosophical problem and that we as students would be best not to use that word during the semester. In the wake of the postmodern tide, this kind of nervousness and apprehension about saying anything determinative about reality has pervaded psychoanalysis. A challenging and much-needed exception to this tendency is Richard Moore's recent book. In this ambitious project, Moore conducts “a psychoanalytic discussion about the relationship between subjectivity and external reality” (p. 1) and addresses the widely recognized paradigm shift between the positivism of Freud's time and the postmodernism of today. His central thesis is that the tension in Freud between objective and narrative reality has not been resolved. Whereas Freud privileged material objectivity, recent writers have focused on subjectivity, which Moore argues has no solid metapsychological grounding. Moore's primary aim is “to help recover psychoanalytic metapsychology in a way that might provide a more solid platform from which to address the issue of a