You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is the work of three psychiatrists who have worked and researched at the Anna Freud Centre and who also have extensive experience within the National Health Service. Two of the authors are also eminent psychoanalysts. Their aim is to convey a psychoanalytic theory of a arange of disorders commonly encountered by psychiatrists, ranging from anxiety states through the various neuroses and personality disorders, to the common psychoses.
Throughout, they mainly take a developmental perspective, showing where possible the infant and childhood antecedents that have left the subsequent adolescent and adult vulnerable to neurotic and/or psychotic disturbances. They devote a considerable amount of space to spelling out their views on the psychodynamic reasons why a disturbance has both a particular form and content, and to discussing the internal and external circumstances that may have led to its appearance at a particular time.
Half of the book is on psychotic disorders. Many will find valuable the presentation of the differing emphases in the various psychoanalytic theories of schizophrenia, starting with Freud and the Schreber case, and moving on to the differing ideas of Katan, Bak and Klein. The question of which are primary and which are secondary phenomena in psychoses remains intriguing and disputed. An account is given of the fundamental difference in opinion on the fate of the ego in schizophrenic and paranoid psychosis between Kleinians and classical analysts.
The authors are particularly good at spelling out classification issues, whether they are discussing different categories within the anxiety states, the neuroses, character disorders or psychoses, or the essential differences between these [and other] major groupings. Psychoanalysts have, for various reasons, tended to disparage classification and to overlook how helpful it can be for accurate communication and discussion, and for the development of metapsychologies, when phenomena are well defined a