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This collection, published as a tribute to Heinz Hartmann on his seventieth birthday, provides a sample of the best in current psychoanalytic writing.
In the first paper following the biographical sketch, Anna Freud, with captivating modesty and grace, writes on the links between Hartmann's work and her own, which, in the late 1930's, emerged from common roots and gave rise to divergent developments. (Their recent convergence is summarized in the Panel Reports, J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., Vol. 15, 1967.)
John Benjamin discusses Hartmann's “Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation,” and strongly disagrees with the criticism that a significant proportion of Hartmann's work is not derived from clinical experience and that many of his concepts are either nonscientific, or clinically insignificant, or restatements of the obvious. Unfortunately, he does not present a convincing refutation, perhaps because the brevity of his paper does not permit indulgence in polemics.
A section on the history of psychoanalysis contains two papers, one by Max Schur, the other by Maurits Katan. Schur, utilizing biographical information and unpublished personal documents, gives us truly fascinating additions to the “day residues” of Freud's Irma dream, and enriches our understanding of the dream and of the dreamer. Katan's paper examines Freud's pre-1914 work to discover the precursors of the concept of the death instinct in Freud's thinking.
Studies of normal and pathological development are represented by contributions from Sally Provence, René Spitz, Margaret Mahler, Albert Solnit, Seymour Lustman, Helen Tartakoff, and Grete Bibring. These papers are impressive in scope, yet they also indicate that the scientific application of observation is still in its formative stage in psychoanalysis. Observational descriptions are often nonspecific and overinclusive,