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Esther Menaker's current collection of papers spans almost 60 years of the distinguished psychoanalyst's life. The 32 essays, 17 of which have been published previously, are organized in sections that reflect the author's major interests: self-psychology, masochism, women's issues, and the history of psychoanalysis. A final chapter is the product of conversations between Menaker and Claude Barbre.
What is particularly noteworthy about this collection is the author's personal reflection on her professional development as she looks back on her evolution from a classical Freudian analyst to a self-psychologist. Observing that for the contemporary patient issues of separation, autonomy, and selfesteem are paramount, she has emphasized the development of the ego,
not in Freud's sense of a structured part of the personality, but in the sense of a developmental process within the psychological growth of the individual by which he or she achieves a differentiation between himself and the outside world.
Although she departed from “instinct theory as the primary and dominant explanation of human behavior,” she freely acknowledges what is useful in the classical method. Witness her two early papers on child analysis (1939 and 1945, appearing here as chapters 31 and 32). As Barry Ulanov notes in his foreword, the essays are models of classical technique that “could be used in training institutes” as exemplars of their kind. Yet, in these first writings there is the sensitivity to family interactions, especially to the unconscious identifications that were later to become major concerns in her work.
With her first papers on masochism (, ) and her 1960 essay on “The Self-image as Defense and Resistance” (chapter 1), she began to focus on the various subsystems of the ego: with identification processes as they interact with the self image, self esteem, and the ego ideal. Her 1965 book, Ego in Evolution, written with her late husband, William Menaker,