The Evolution of Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice. By John E. Gedo. New York:  Other Press, 1999,  246 + xvi pp.

“Psychoanalysis must simultaneously explicate a world of personal reasons and one of organismic causes” writes John Gedo (p. 200). In this elegant, disarmingly simple sentence is contained both the premise and the summation of this, Gedo's eighteenth book (and his last, as he told his audience recently when he received the Hans W. Loewald Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalysis from the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education). It is not with idealization but with profound appreciation for the decades of devoted, questioning clinical practice and theoretical study that have characterized the whole of Gedo's professional life that I consider this book virtually an apotheosis of sound, responsible psychoanalytic scholarship. In comprising an examination of sixty monographs that Gedo deems of great significance to the development of psychoanalysis over a 25-year period (1974-1997), the book is as intensely personal as it is conceptually formidable, simultaneously the reflection and the result of that professional life. Intellectually rigorous, and beautifully, lucidly, written, the book is cracklingly alive—so alive that flipping through the pages of my review copy releases a red cloud of underlinings, stars, arrows, and irresistible conversational notes. Gedo begins:

As it has concluded the first century of its existence, psychoanalysis as a domain of knowledge faced a number of interrelated crises. The challenge perhaps most urgent was provided by a series of follow-up studies that called into question the efficacy of the traditional treatment methods most psychoanalysts utilized. Almost simultaneously, the consensus about the metapsychology Freud devised at the birth of psychoanalysis collapsed under rigorous scrutiny from theoreticians and methodologists. The important changes within the philosophy of science that characterize the late twentieth century have called into question the epistemic foundations of psychoanalysis and raised dou