Integrating Theory: Every Clinician's Task, One Clinician's Guide: Useful Servants: Psychodynamic Approaches to Clinical Practice. Levine, Susan S. New York:  Jason Aronson, 1996,  296 pages, $40.00.

A friend once told me the story of a man who spent his life searching through the great libraries of the world for that one book that contained all books. The yearning for integration, clarity, and certainty is universal, its realization symbolized by the terms Utopia, Eden and Heaven. This is the quest of religions and political systems, the essence of the alchemists' pursuit, forever being sought in love or sexual experience, and currently a focus of contemporary theory building.

According to some scientists we seem to be moving a step closer to a unifying theory. Concepts from physics, such as chaos, complexity, and fuzzy thinking are being cross-pollinated with counterparts in behavioral science, including psychoanalysis. They add a richness of thought and potential for knowledge in each of the crossover disciplines. The concepts of time, space and relationship, are aspects of the Unconscious and ideas that we work with in clinical practice. They are also formulations that preoccupy the thinking of mathematicians and other physical scientists. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize physicist put it, “… one truth explains another …” (Weinberg, 1994, p. 9). His book is called Dreaming of a Final Theory. We probably would call this phenomenon a fantasy, because the word dream has, for us, a more particular meaning.

Western civilization has been on a continuous search for the unifying basis of matter. In pre-Socratic times Thales thought it was water, and Anaximous, another Milesan, considered it to be air. In psychoanalysis we have also tried to identify the most basic theory component-sex, aggression, the relationship, technique, transference, countertransference, the ego, the self, the interactional reality. Students hope they will fi