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Like the author of a comparative anatomy book who entitled one of its chapters, “The Skin, Jack of All Trades,” Trygve Braatøy has written a very readable text in his Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique. Braatøy's analyst was Otto Fenichel, whose solid classic The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, presents the traditional analytic concepts in lucid but hardly scintillating fashion. While Braatøy's debt to Fenichel is apparent in his general adherence to orthodox theory, he wanders far afield from the narrow confines encircling the Freudian disciples.
In Chapter One, which the author entitles “Love—The Basis of Personal Psychotherapy,” he reviews a series of ten cases published in a book by Helen Leland Witmer called Psychiatric Interviews with Children. He abstracts from them what he feels to be the qualities essential to the personalities of effective therapists, no matter what their orientation—namely, warmth, acceptance and flexibility. As Braatøy puts it, “Love must come before morals.” His “most basic rule in psychotherapy (is) to detect as best one can the essential needs of the patient and let those needs set the rules.”
In the same chapter Braatøy succeeds in analyzing the activities of the quoted therapists and also manages to explain in non-jargonese such concepts as orality and anality and their applicability to the understanding and treatment of patients with problems in those spheres. He ends the chapter with a “Moral,” from which the following is quoted: “Psychoanalysis and related personal psychotherapy are based on the changes which occur in a person when he is given the chance to unburden himself in the presence of another healthier, more independent individual. This process will never start unless the therapist has a surplus of warmth…. In accepting students or doctors for training in psychoanalysis, this aspect should be of central importance. Concretely: choosing between a cool, schizoid character with an IQ of 145 and a lively warm person wi