The author is a senior psychoanalyst at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Clinic in New York city trained in the Rado school. He gives great credit to his illustrious teacher who first wrote about depressions with classical psychoanalytic concepts but later from his own "adaptive" and "reparative" frames of reference.
The book reprints papers by Abraham, Freud, Rado, Fenichel, Bibring, Klein, Spitz, Bowlby, Lorand, Jacobson, and Levine. Some of the first named have been reprinted before but the total ensemble of these papers on depression is here published together for the first time. But the value of the book is the editor's chapter entitled "The Meaning of Despair." In 22 pages he sketches the evolution of psychoanalytic concepts of depression concisely and clearly. This would have been enough for a review article. The classical contributions by Abraham, Freud, and Rado are easily available elsewhere. The others are in the "current"