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Bonime's book consists of his many collected papers, including one published as early as 1953, with the latest two papers published in 1986. One of the problems with the book is that some of the chapters are aimed at essentially a lay audience or an audience of relatively low-level mental health workers, while others attain a higher degree of technical discussion. Examples of the former are the papers reprinted from the Journal of the Child Study Association of America, a journal and association that no longer exists. The unfortunate effect is that the book is often quite repetitive. Such a clear writer in my opinion would have done better to start fresh from his collected papers and write a new book; of course, this is a much more difficult task. The papers are divided into three sections: one on anxiety and other barriers to therapeutic progress; one on depression and paranoia; and one on dreams, then concluding with a few papers under the rubric of “coda.” This was an extremely difficult book for me to review, although it is written by an intuitive clinician with many years of experience. For many pages of the book I had the uncomfortable feeling that something was missing, and it was only toward the middle of the book that I began to understand what it was.
At the risk of rewriting Bonime's book for him, I would have put the “coda” first, because it outlines most clearly his clinical approach and contains what I regard to be the best paper illustrating his technique contained in the book. Unfortunately, none of the collected papers are given chapter numbers, so in order to refer to them, I have to give the title. The paper just mentioned as an excellent introduction to Bonime's point of view is cumbersomely entitled “Intellectual Insight, Changing Consciousness, and the Progression of Processes During Psychoanalysis,” originally published in 1961. He writes, “Personality evolves basically through interpersonal experience, and it is through interpersonal experienc