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Modeled after other well-known annual surveys in the field of physiology, psychology, neurology and innumerable others which have proved so useful, we are now presented
with such an effort in the area of psychoanalytic publications. The present volume covers the productions of 1950. Dr. Frosch has had the help of such collaborators as Jacob A. Arlow, N. Ross, and Sidney Tarachow. The advisory board consists of R. P. Knight, B. D. Lewin and R. M. Loewenstein—sufficient to guarantee a careful and valuable volume. Many others (listed at the end of the book) have been associated in the work on this volume.
The method followed was that of the older German “Sammelreferat.” After establishing a working classification of all the publications to be surveyed, the material was then organized into chapters in an integrated and continuous (as far as possible) form. Only strictly psychoanalytical material was considered; foreign publications were utilized as well as those in our own language. Thus this task of “compiling the current literature and presenting it in a readable and tune-saving manner” is what in essence we have in this volume. No one will deny its usefulness; although one might quibble with the inclusion this or the exclusion of that.
Some seventeen journals and annuals were covered; some 231 articles and twelve books reviewed. The material was divided up in twelve chapters edited by various hands: history, methodology, ego psychology, clinical studies, child analysis, therapy, training and practice, applied psychoanalysis, etc. The whole is certainly a very inclusive coverage of the analytic literature of a given year. It may well continue the survey of the literature so ably begun by Fenichel in his “Theory of the Neurosis.” Perhaps not as well, not so coordinated and not so encyclopedical, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?
By its nature, analytic material is neither easily and quickly read, nor readily abstracted. The editors and their collaborators have don