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One of the many challenges facing psychotherapists at the threshold of the 21st century is that the cultural nuances and the richness of our field will be lost in the current streamlining tendencies as evidenced in many areas of popular culture. A recent article in the Boston Globe (“The Need for Speed,” November 19, 2005) reports an increased market for nonfiction books to be brief, “more and more close to pamphlets,” and observes that The Holocaust: The Third Reich and The Jews, by David Engel, is less than 90 pages.
For those of us engaged as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, the prospect of bringing our particular culture and history into the future is daunting: the Scylla of managed care and the Charybdis of psychopharmacology pose significant threats to the modest enterprise of talking therapy. Into these intellectual shoals, McWilliams' Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy stands as a beacon, not simply recalling, but recreating the tenets of psychoanalytic practice in a broad-minded and frank way.
McWilliams' goals in writing this book are to pass on our rich oral tradition, to remedy distortions that abound in understanding psychoanalytic therapy, to offer support and “tips” to the therapist, especially the beginning therapist, and to find a bedrock of commonalities both in the differing psychoanalytic orthodoxies and between behavioral and cognitive therapies. This book will be a godsend to beginning therapists, and yet a stimulating read for the more experienced practitioner. McWilliams has a rare ability to celebrate the pluralities in our practices, despite deep divisions in theory and so-called technique, while emphasizing the fundamental similarities in practice necessary to create and foster therapeutic relationships.
As McWilliams sees it, the goal of psychoanalytic therapy is authenticity and emotional honesty. Nevertheless, she recognizes that the difficulties that patients bring to therapy now may be more challenging both practically and psychically than