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Paul Wachtel's most recent book, Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self, represents a summation on many levels. Wachtel has been contributing to progressive experience-near thinking in psychoanalysis since the early 70s. This text summarizes virtually his entire corpus of work. Of course it is no mere summation. It integrates many related facets of his thinking from epistemology, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, relational theory, cyclical dynamics, and the clinical issues of inequality and injustice.
Over many years Wachtel's quiet, personal voice has contributed to a growing shift in our thinking, one that promotes integration over the entire spectrum of psychoanalytic thought. He was the impetus for the organization “Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration,” an organization steadily growing in numbers and influence. He certainly was the first psychoanalyst who saw compatibilities between psychoanalysis and behaviorism and his vision across the many progressive strains in recent psychoanalytic thinking is, as reviewers have called it “seminal” and “breathtaking.” In the current book he continues to summarize and integrate the recent theoretical ferment in our field but now adds inequality and injustice to his psychoanalytic vision. By bringing social, cultural, class, and racial issues to the fore in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, he creates a bold tableau of how we can achieve social and political reform. This level of integration of the individual, social, and political worlds is rare in our field.
Is the book all about theory and not about praxis? Not at all. The material on Resistance is especially valuable in this regard, showing how Wachtel's theoretical thinking contributes directly to his clinical understanding of treatment alliances and therapeutic unfolding. Early on, Wachtel makes the unambiguous statement that resistance is “one of the most problematic and potentially counterproductive concepts in the entire field of psyc