Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual: The Freud Lectures at Yale. Loewald, Hans W. New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1978.  x+77 pp.

This book consists of the three Freud Lectures delivered by Hans W. Loewald at Yale, a series supported by the Mark and Viva Kanzer Fund established to promote scholarly exchange between psychoanalysis and the humanities. The aim of the lecture series in general, and Loewald's contribution in particular, is to help clarify the place of psychoanalysis as a scientifically-oriented discipline within the humanities.

Actually the book is a series of reflections by a psychoanalyst on broadly defined philosophical issues. Psychoanalytic readers are accustomed to find the analytic theorist looking toward philosophy for help in clarifying or justifying the processes by which the forming or propositions is accomplished in psychoanalysis. By contrast, Loewald uses his deeply integrated psychoanalytic knowledge to illuminate philosophical questions.

In language which to the analyst may at times seem somewhat unfamiliar but which is strongly evocative, Loewald specifically addresses himself to questions of what the psychoanalytic body of theory and its associated method of investigation (psychoanalytic therapy) imply about man as a moral being. man's loving nature, and man's capacity for awe, religious feeling, and a sense of unity with nature. Throughout the book there is one theme which appears to emerge most forcefully and out of which most of Loewald's argument proceeds. Mental life, he says, seems to consist of a constant dialogue and interchange between the primary forms of mental organization of experience, the unconscious or id, and the secondary forms, the conscious/preconscious or ego. In this dialogue, incidentally, Loewald redefines the intermediate organization of mentation between the conscious and unconscious as “conscient.” He wishes to convey with this term what might also be called a ‘dynamic preconscious’.

One line of development in the history of psychoanalysis can be traced from the establishment of the relative dominance of unconscious and instinctual mental a