Intelligence and Adaptation: An Integration of Psychoanalytic and Piagetian Developmental Psychology. Stanley I. Greenspan. New York:  International Universities Press, 1979.  408 pp.: Understanding Piaget: An Introduction to Children's Cognitive Development. Revised and Expanded Edition. Mary Ann Spencer Pulaski. New York:  Harper and Row 1980  xvii + 248 pp.

Since the death of Rapaport in 1960, psychoanalysis has functioned without either a great systemizer or a link to general cognitive psychology. While others—G. Klein, Holt, Gill, and Noy—have made important contributions to a psychoanalytic theory of cognitive development, the general tendency has been to search outside the psychodynamic domain for supplementing or emendating Freud's formulations on cognition. Psychoanalysts in search of a cognitive theory, having surveyed the field from Werner's Organismic-Developmental model to information theory, have in the last decade focused on Genetic Epistomology, the scientific study of the development of knowledge, and its founder, Jean Piaget. Authors such as Odier, Wolfe, and Anthony have drawn parallels between aspects of psychoanalysis and genetic epistomology. However, Greenspan's book is the first systematic attempt to incorporate the whole of Piagetian thinking within the matrix of contemporary ego psychology. Greenspan states his objective early in the book: “Our goal is to create a more comprehensive psychoanalytic system by including within it, as a subsystem (italics added) Piaget's cognitive psychology” (p. 35). For this effort the author is to be commended. The book is scholarly and an adept attempt at integration. And yet, inherent in this attempt are some shortcomings which leave the reader with a sense of only partial satisfaction.

The problem and direction for psychoanalytic theory was posited by , shortly before his death:

In psychoanalytic theory, structures play such a crucial role that as long as the propensities and changes of psychological structure cannot be expressed in the same dimensions as psychological processes, dimensional quantification is but a pious hope. In other words, the study of the process of psychological structure formation seems to be the prime requisite for progress toward dimensional quantification. We must establish how processes turn into structures, how a structure once formed,