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The Power of the Inner Judge is a thought-provoking book that offers a new approach to working with what are commonly known as borderline patients. Wurmser is a psychoanalyst who teaches in West Virginia, maintains a private practice in Maryland, and is a member and supervisor of the New York Freudian Society, obviously a man who gets around. He has written numerous books and articles dealing with such subjects as addiction, shame, guilt, and resentment. His latest book focuses on the long-term psychoanalytic treatment of severely disturbed but not psychotic patients.
Wurmser “gets around” figuratively as well as geographically in his use of a wide range of literary references—from authors such as Blake, Popper, Plato, and Shakespeare—helping to place psychoanalysis in a wider cultural environment. The most striking quote is from Kant: “Experience without concepts is blind, concepts without experience are empty.” (He also quotes Confucius along similar lines: “Learning without thinking is empty, thinking without learning is dangerous.”)
Wurmser has both concepts and experience well in hand, and he uses them in this book to offer a different slant on many familiar psychoanalytic terms. However, Wurmser focuses too much on how he is different as opposed to similar to other clinicians. It is interesting how he can find similarities that illustrate so many disparate areas of written culture—from Chinese philosophy to Shakespeare—yet does not do so across psychoanalytic orientations. For example, he uses the term severe neurosis instead of borderline, and he refers to acting in as “acting out” sensu strictiori. His discussion of defenses also takes some getting used to as he gives them his own unique twist. Thus, he describes splitting as being: “Not an elementary form of defense but rather the result of multiple defensive processes.”
Wurmser's central focus is on the superego and, specifically, its role in the severe neurosis. He rejects the terminology “borderline,” which