The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) is a uniquely complex writer and the originator of an especially unsettling view of the human subject. But the singularity of Lacan’s achievement has been understated by many of his critics. Often he is seen merely as a figure famous for being famous—an essential reference point in structuralist and poststructuralist debate—rather than as a theorist whose writings demand and reward detailed scrutiny.

Malcolm Bowie traces the development of Lacan’s ideas over the fifty-year span of his writing and teaching career. The primary focus is on the fascinating mutations in Lacan’s interpretation of Freud. Bowie reinserts the celebrated slogans—“The unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” “The unconscious is structured like a language,” and so forth—into the history of Lacan’s thinking, and pinpoints the paradoxes and anomalies that mark his account of human sexuality. This book provides a firm basis for the critical evaluation of Lacan’s ideas and the rhetoric in which they are embedded; it is based on a close reading of Lacan’s original texts but presupposes no knowledge of French in the reader.

Although Bowie is sharply critical of Lacan on several major analytic questions, he argues that Lacan is the only psychoanalyst after Freud whose intellectual achievement is seriously comparable to Freud’s own. Lacan provides the ideal starting point for any exploration of the work of this formidable thinker.

Hilde Bruch sets out to accomplish what has, until now, been virtually impossible—the teaching of psychotherapy by use of the written word, communicating the wisdom of a lifetime. Perhaps Dr. Bruch’s unique success at a task that has been tried and tried again, only to result in stereotyped dos and don’ts, stems from her own learning experiences with two great teachers: Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.

Dr. Bruch shares her knowledge of the essential purpose of intensive psychotherapy as it has been shaped over her many years as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and teacher. She sets forth a theoretical frame in straightforward and unmystical language without minimizing the complexities of demand that therapy makes on both patient and therapist.

The reader accompanies the therapist from his first encounter with the stranger who comes to him with his trouble through the various steps that lead to the resolution of the problems. The patient is viewed as a participant in a multifaceted system of many experiences and people, not as an individual isolated from the world around him. In Dr. Bruch’s conception, psychotherapy is a situation where two people interact and try to come to an understanding of one another, with the specific goal of accomplishing something beneficial for the complaining person. The factors that help or hinder the attainment of this interaction are spelled out in the book, and the entire process of learning psychotherapy is thereby illuminated.

When Sigmund Freud was nearly seventy and reflecting upon his life, he noted in Selbstdarstellung that during his youth he was consumed with a passion for knowledge that had more to do with human relationships than with natural objects. This collection of nearly eighty letters, written by Freud to his boyhood chum Eduard Silberstein, attests to that earlier, more whimsical life and to the existence of a deeply sensitive, observant youth.

The letters were composed over a period of ten years during which Freud and Silberstein attended secondary school and later the university in Vienna. They are the earliest primary source available on Freud's childhood and the only surviving documentation of his adolescence. Written in a witty, playful, and sometimes sanctimonious style, the letters bring to light a panoply of public and private interests: Freud's attitudes toward Bismarck and social democracy, his philosophical studies and professional leanings, as well as the innocent assault of first love, his earliest sexual stirrings, and his musings on the differences between men and women. What emerges in these letters is the special nature of this adolescent friendship, which was characterized by its own private mythology, code, and membership in an exclusive secret society invented by the two young correspondents. These letters sketch a unique portrait of Freud's youth. They will be a rich resource for scholars and all those interested in Sigmund Freud's formative years.

We have seen these children—the shy and the sociable, the cautious and the daring—and wondered what makes one avoid new experience and another avidly pursue it. At the crux of the issue surrounding the contribution of nature to development is the study that Jerome Kagan and his colleagues have been conducting for more than two decades. In The Long Shadow of Temperament, Kagan and Nancy Snidman summarize the results of this unique inquiry into human temperaments, one of the best-known longitudinal studies in developmental psychology. These results reveal how deeply certain fundamental temperamental biases can be preserved over development.

Identifying two extreme temperamental types—inhibited and uninhibited in childhood, and high-reactive and low-reactive in very young babies—Kagan and his colleagues returned to these children as adolescents. Surprisingly, one of the temperaments revealed in infancy predicted a cautious, fearful personality in early childhood and a dour mood in adolescence. The other bias predicted a bold childhood personality and an exuberant, sanguine mood in adolescence. These personalities were matched by different biological properties. In a masterly summary of their wide-ranging exploration, Kagan and Snidman conclude that these two temperaments are the result of inherited biologies probably rooted in the differential excitability of particular brain structures. Though the authors appreciate that temperamental tendencies can be modified by experience, this compelling work—an empirical and conceptual tour-de-force—shows how long the shadow of temperament is cast over psychological development.