Topography and Systems in Psychoanalytic Theory. By Merton M. Gill. Psychological Issues, Monograph 10, New York:  International Universities Press, 1963.

Freud ultimately defined the term metapsychology as the study of the assumptions upon which the system of psychoanalytic theory is based. Rapaport and Gill* previously set about systematizing a minimal set of assumptions and concluded that the points of view may be categorized as the dynamic, economic, structural, genetic and adaptive points of view.

Since one of Freud's original metapsychological points of view was the topographical, in eliminating this viewpoint, Rapaport and Gill were confronted with the necessity of defending their position. This they attempt in the volume under review; it began as a joint effort, but gradually passed into the capable hands of Dr. Gill.

The main purpose of the monograph is to critically examine the topographic point of view, particularly as it relates to the later structural point of view, systematized as id, ego, and superego. As Gill states in his introduction: “It is not even clear whether the structural and topographic points of view are different, and, if so, whether they should both be counted among the points of view of metapsychology.”

In a most lucid presentation, which belies the difficulties of digging through and interpreting the ambiguities of Freud's usage of terms, Gill carefully documents and presents the main components and criteria by which the major topographic systems and structural theories are defined. We follow, historically, the reasons for the shifting from the topographic to the structural theory, and the unresolved difficulties which still remained. Gill then makes an important contribution in proposing, “a different solution for that difficulty of the topographic theory which Freud explicitly gave as the basis for introducing the structural systems, namely that the repressed and the repressing forces had both been put into the same system (the Ucs).” Putting them into the id and ego respectively, offered no solution for clinical reasons. Gill therefore sets about redefining the id and ego, by thinking of