Masochism and The Emergent Ego. Selected Papers of Esther Menaker. Leila Lerner (Ed.). New York:  Human Sciences Press, 1979.  XIV + 370 pp.

This collection of 22 essays covers a span of almost 40 years of Dr. Menaker's work, although the majority of the essays were written since 1960. They are grouped into three sections covering aspects of masochism, identification and the social process, and creativity, with an introduction to each section written by the editor, Leila Lerner. There is a remarkable degree of coherence in the structure and themes of these papers, so that it is more like reading an integrated work than a collection of disparate essays. Furthermore, in most of the papers, Dr. Menaker discusses an issue conceptually and then illustrates the concept in the context of her therapeutic work with a particular person. This conveys a sense of immediacy and aliveness that deepens the meaning of the theoretical issue.

Menaker's major theme is the development of the self, and its vicissitudes, from the early dependent, symbiotic mother-child relationship to the autonomously functioning adult characterized by a firm sense of identity and self-esteem. Her term for self is ego but she makes it clear that:

Ego is not a secondary derivative of interactions of other aspects of the personality, such as instinctual impulses with environment; it is that synthesized quality of awareness through which all else is experienced. Ego represents the continuity of what the individual is in all the dimensions of space and time (p. 347).