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This book may very well suffer the fate of all small books: it can easily be overlooked, particularly when the majority of the works in our field are becoming larger and larger. Lederer offers us a penetrating examination of the metapsychology of the superego. He describes the modes of existence permeating delinquency (his analysis is provocative) and what he calls “sans-identity,” a condition we are seeing increasingly in our young adult clients. He regards both delinquency and “sans-identity” as deficiency diseases, referring to the inadequate paternal strength in the real environment and the subsequent inadequate superego development in the affected boy.
To examine aspects of positive superego functioning is a relatively difficult and complicated task—difficult because there are few studies in depth outlining the impact of the father on a boy's personality development; complicated because we generally do not focus upon destruction and protection as aspects of the same object in quite the way this author has done. Lederer does not focus upon “parents,” but singles out the father, believing that mother and father stand, typically and ideally, for two different modes of loving. Father's love, he says, is a demanding love, conditional on performance. The love that the father gives cannot be taken for granted, for fathers love “more dangerously.”
Developing this theme, Lederer takes the reader through ancient Oriental and Occidental mythology, utilizing the thematic myth of the dragon. Why the dragon? Because it represents, universally, an imago terribly destructive, yet at the same time infinitely protective. The works of Erikson, Wheelis, Aichhorn, and Tillich are synthesized into a most