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At first reading this is a seductive book, written with wit and charm and bringing familiar material into new relationships. The seduction lies in the persuasive simplicity of the ideas and in the absence of any propositions which might arouse our resistance. It represents, in part, the latest of the many attempts to arrive at a theory of psychological types. Balint bases his theory not on the dominance of one or another instinctual drive or level of fixation or structural dominance, but on what he finds are the two possible ways of handling life's earliest problem—the dissolution of primary love by the emergence of objects. In an earlier work, Primary Love and Psychoanalytic Technique, Balint had described a hypothetical earliest relation between mother and neonate which he designated as primary love, and which is characterized as a “harmonious mixup.” It is “a relationship in which only one partner may have demands and claims; the other partner (or partners, i.e., the whole world) must have no interests, no wishes, no demands of his or her own. There is, and must be, a complete harmony, i.e., a complete identity of wishes and satisfactions.” (p. 22) With the emergence of objects, two types of reactors are possible, the philobat, who gladly ventures into the “friendly expanses” and avoids treacherous objects, and the ocnophil, who dreads