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When Juliet utters the astonishing lines given her by Shakespeare (1953, p. 885), “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet,” she both expresses her love for Romeo and alludes to the destructive meaninglessness of the vendetta between the Montagues and the Capulets. “Psychoanalytic phenomenology” is the name given by Stolorow and Atwood (1979, 1984) to their theoretical standpoint, one that they claim resolves the thorny problems that have plagued psychoanalysis from its inception. As a name, psychoanalytic phenomenology has the same relative insignificance as the name Montague; as a concept, it is a theoretical equivalent of Mercutio's injunction against the vendetta that terminated only when Romeo and Juliet died in a double suicide: “A plague o' both your houses” (, p. 893). That is, Stolorow and Atwood claim that psychoanalytic phenomenology is a theoretical framework that not only obviates the differences between rival schools of psychoanalysis, such as Freudian, Jungian, et cetera, but also eliminates the conditions that lead to the proliferation of such schools.
The problem that Stolorow and Atwood confront is the fragmentation of personality theory that permeates the history of psychology, including the history of psychoanalysis. That is, differing personality theories are constructed in a manner that precludes synthesis into one general theory. The result of this is that genuine knowledge and insights obtained by many researcher-theorists cannot be accumulated into a coherent stock. This indicates that personality theory has not attained the status of science. The general aim of the authors of the two books under review here is to present a theory that they believe eliminates the conditions that generate rival schools and thus enables