Knowledge as Desire: An Essay on Freud and Piaget. Hans Furth. New York:  Columbia University Press, 1987,  180 pp.

Hans Furth is a distinguished developmental psychologist, a scholar working in the tradition of Piaget and Werner, with a long career of research and theoretical writing in the areas of cognitive and language development. It is both poignant and inspiring that Furth, at the peak of his intellectual powers and scholarly activity, has set out to produce a work of synthesis. Poignant, because, as Furth himself notes, the work of synthesizing Piaget and Freud, of building bridges between cognitive theory and a theory of affect, identity, and the emotions, is particularly difficult within a historical context of intellectual and pedagogical institutions that thrive on rupture, boundary, and distinction.

Furth acknowledges the influence of a little-known figure in developmental psychology, John MacMurray. But it is striking that Furth appears to have had to work out the conceptual synthesis without recourse to the post-Freudian tradition in analytic theory. There is no reference in this volume to Mahler or Lacan or, above all, Winnicott, in the theoretical work aimed at examining the cathexis of desire in symbols and objects of knowledge.

Fundamentally, this is a hopeful and inspiring book, simultaneously an act of creative synthesis and of legitimation. Cognitive psychology, in all its branches, has been trenchantly committed to the splitting of thought and emotion, the severing of the social and the epistemological. Furth's work, here, constitutes a deep critique of that atomizing and conceptually threadbare