Edward J. Kempf: Selected Papers. Dorothy Clarke Kempf and John C. Burnham (Eds.). Bloomington, Ind.:  Indiana University Press, 1974.  vi + 402 pp.

One of the early American contributors to the psychoanalytic literature, Edward J. Kempf (1885-1971), was the author of three books and thirty-two papers published between 1913 and 1965. Fourteen of the papers, including three of the six that appeared originally in The Psychoanalytic Review between 1915 and 1919, are assembled in this volume. Kempf's widow, a physician who served as his research assistant, collaborated with John Burnham, a psychologist, in preparing this representative sampling of Kempf's writings on a wide range of topics “because Kempf worked independently and had no students” (p. 4).

Nevertheless, as a young hospital psychiatrist pioneering in the application of psychoanalytic concepts and technical modifications in his work with psychotic patients, Kempf exerted significant influence in the field. The first section of this book includes the treatment histories he reported during that period; these papers, like his massive book Psychopathology, published in 1920, attracted widespread attention to the amenability of psychotic patients to psychoanalytic inquiry.

In a letter to Burnham in 1959, Kempf recalled being fired from Indianapolis State Hospital for trying to institute this approach against the superintendent's approval.

Here in 1912-1913 I applied successfully for the first time in the history of psychiatry the methods used by Freud in analyzing the symptoms of hysteria, to analyzing the symptoms of selected cases of dementia praecox, later called schizophrenia…. He believed that schizophrenia had a defective constitutional basis and was incurable by his method of psychoanalysis. My views were largely in agreement with Freud's except that I held, in addition, from analytical experience that an active method of analyzing the schizophrenic attitude was necessary…. The passive method of analysis as applied by Freud and his school had proven to be inefficient and time wasting. When I was analyzed by Ferenczi in 1926 I found that my views were cons