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and (eds.). New York: International Universities Press, 1991, xvi + 639 pp.
One of the talents a curator of an art museum or a private collector with unlimited funds can display is selecting pieces that best represent a particular artist's body of work. Besides demonstrating good taste, evaluation of the selector's contribution may include an admiration for his or her unifying vision as conveyed by the way he or she organizes and synthesizes the work to be displayed. His or her integrative capacities can be revealed through the linking of the similar and commentary on the evolutionary changes that the perspective offers. Similarly, the editors of an anthology have an opportunity to assemble the selected writings of revered clinicians of the past as well as recent innovators, and through bridging analytic summaries, convey how these individual papers represent the dominant thoughts of a particular period as well as represent modal points in the unfolding development and progress of our field.
It is hard to be critical of a book that offers the informed analyst a collection of some of the finest papers written during the past 100 years on the topic of character and character pathology. The major contribution editors Kets de Vries and Perzow have made is in assembling these pivotal papers and attempting to group them in a way that provides historical context and some evolutionary perspective. The importance of the papers and the profound content contained within each is reason enough to read this book. The editors have arranged the papers into five sections, and they provide an introductory comment to each with a varying degree of explanation and depth. The first four sections move from the earliest conceptions of Freud and Abraham on the subject to the writings of latter-day authors up to around 1980. The organization also moves from the typical features of classical neurosis and controversies about what constitutes character a