With this text, Moshe Spero, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and Talmudic scholar, continues his single-minded, self-imposed goal of seeking practical responses to halakhic-ethical issues related to psychotherapeutic values and interventive methodology.

His extensive halakhic research is focused on establishing authorization for the use of psychotherapeutic techniques with Orthodox Jewish patients. Often, as he says, he must develop “alternative” halakhic patterns to satisfy (justify?) use of particular clinical approaches. Yet, at no point, does the author desert or neglect either his halakhic ethics or his modern psychological principles.

As an interesting example, Spero compares the “Halakhic process of teshuvah (repentance) which includes the corrective mechanisms of hokhachah (ethical rebuke) and vidduy (confession of sin)” with his accompanying view of psychotherapy as a “corrective process,” implemented through the use of psychological