Psychoanalysis and Motivation. Joseph D. Lichtenberg. Hillsdale, NJ:  Analytic, 1989,  422 pp.

This is a comprehensive and scholarly work that ought to serve as a source book for researchers in infant psychiatry as well as for those in clinical psychoanalysis. Both disciplines will find Lichtenberg's particular way of organizing the findings of infant research, his ensuing elaborations, and his own creative additions to the theory of human development extremely useful in their areas of investigation. The rich assortment of clinical vignettes (taken either from the literature or from Lichtenberg's own clinical experiences) are particularly helpful to clinicians as they exemplify the pathological consequences when a particular developmental experience has gone awry. Explicating an impressive array of research data of the first 2 years of life and marshalling evidence that he derived from various perspectives (psychoanalysis, affect theory, cognitive psychology, ethology, and neurophysiology), the author presents his thesis with extraordinary thoroughness.

The major thesis of the book is that psychological development can be traced to five major motivational systems, each of which is based on a “basic need”: (1) the regulation of physiological requirements; (2) attachment-affiliation; (3) exploratory-assertive; (4) aversive; and (5) sensual-sexual. The author carefully documents his assertion that the five systems, though interrelated and functioning simultaneously and at times synergistically, can be clearly delineated from each other.

What does Lichtenberg mean by motivation and motivational systems? The author gives a simple definition of the former: “whatever infants do with observable consistency, they are motivated to do” (p. 7). He then offers the feeding experience as an example because it involves several motivational systems: Hunger as a biological need initiates, that is, it sets the “lived experience” of feeding into motion, which not only regulates a