Practical Psychoanalysis for Therapists and Patients, Owen Renik,  Other Press, New York, 2006,  192 pp.

Owen Renik has been one of the foremost advocates of a fully intersubjective point of view in the psychoanalytic situation. Renik has persuasively argued that everything that the analyst says or does is an expression of the analyst's irreducible subjectivity. As a consequence, the analyst may as well “play his cards face up,” that is explicitly disclose the analyst's subjective point of view. Such personal self-disclosure opens up the possibility of a straightforward and honest dialogue between two people with two different perspectives on the patient's problems and the therapeutic relationship. Renik reiterates his well-known positions on the analyst's subjectivity and the analyst's self-disclosure in his new book. Yet Renik provides in this volume some “practical” advice about the conduct of psychoanalysis. In contrast, to most contemporary relational analysts who shy away from giving prescriptive advice about how to conduct a psychoanalytic treatment, Renik shares his accumulated clinical wisdom about how one can become an effective psychoanalyst who gets results.

By “practical” Renik means an analysis that focuses on setting up goals for treatment and regularly monitoring progress towards achieving those results as a measure of the effectiveness of the treatment. Renik approaches this process in a collaborative way always striving to help the patient define his or her goals for treatment. Renik is not an analyst who will keep patients in analysis interminable with ill-defined goals for treatment and with little or no discernable therapeutic progress. Of course, this has always been a touchy issue for psychoanalysts, especially now in an age of evidence-based treatments. Renik is one to make lack of discernable progress in the treatment an important focus of analytic scrutiny.

Renik is unique among relational analysts not only for being results oriented but also for viewing stimulation of the patient's reality testing as the crucial therapeutic process through whic