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It is usually best, to maintain credibility, not to engage in hyperbole when reviewing a book. With this caveat, let me state my opinion: this is the best book written on psychoanalytic technique in the (admittedly young) 21st century. Even
after 35 years of doing psychoanalysis myself, reading the book was a profound pleasure and shed light on some of my own experiences in analyzing patients with different psychic structures. This book illustrates how interpretive psychoanalysis operates, the benefits of the analytic work to the patient, and how patients are able to resolve their problems during the analysis and get on with their lives.
This book is up-to-date, utilizing all of the theories that 21st century psychoanalysis has at its disposal: modern conflict theory's attention to drive, superego, affect, defense, compromise formation, and transference; modern ego psychology's concepts about autonomous ego functions and ego strengths; Kernberg's (1975) modifications of Mahler (1968); Mahler et al. (1975) object relation theories to include splitting and separation; Kohut's (1959, 1971) concepts regarding the self; and Melanie Klein's (1945) concepts regarding internalization, externalization, and projective identification. Dr. Volkan does a masterful job of describing the psychoanalytic process in such a way that one need not choose only one of these theories.
How is this possible? For decades upon decades, psychoanalysts have argued with each other about how to understand clinical theory (Steiner, 1985) and about which “metapsychological” theory explained the clinical theories (Kernberg, 1967, 1975; Blum, 1980; Blum [responding to Fonagy], 2003; Abend et al., 1983; Etchegoyen, 1991; Krause-Prozan, 1993; Greenberg, 1995; Rothstein, 1995; Pine, 1990, 1998; Akhtar, 2007).
Technical ideas regarding analysis have been enshrined in eponymic grandeur, for example, Freudian, Mahlerian, Kohutian, and Kleinian. Freud's early papers and Fenichel's seminal textbook (1941—also