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Leo Rangell, the well-known and prolific psychoanalyst from Los Angeles, has compiled thirty-five of his many papers in these two volumes. He attempts, subtly and in a thought-provoking manner to develop his psychoanalytic conception of what he calls the Human Core.
He aims to develop a theory of behaviour from a psychoanalytic perspective and launches himself on this not-inconsiderable challenge from his wide-ranging experience as clinician and teacher, as well as ex-President of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.
The thread that runs through this collection of papers is the attempt to study the role of ‘choice’ and ‘will’ (free will) within the bounds of psychic determinism. Previous attempts have constituted a difficulty for those theorists of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy (Fromm, Sullivan, Rogers, and others) who have tried to tackle the issue from different perspectives. Rangell's starting-point is firmly based in that stream of ego psychology that follows Hartmann and Rapaport in psychoanalysis.
In the first volume, Rangell describes micro and macro psychic processes — elements one could call them — of the totality of psychic experience, the organising of which he calls the Human Core. His first section contains mainly clinical papers which are used to illustrate the attention paid to intrapsychic processes in terms of anxiety, affect, and conflict. In the second section he goes on to elaborate the theories about these themes in which his two classic papers integrating Freud's two theories of anxiety are included, as well as his paper ‘A Psychoanalytic Theory of Affects’.
Finally, he comes to what is his original contribution, which deserves a great deal of thought as he attempts to describe the issue of the ego's unconscious ‘choice’ in dealing with anxiety aroused by a particular conflict. Rangell describes the forces that the ego has to contend with in making this choice, as well as the ‘process’ of choice and its corollaries: responsibility, a