The Search for a Relational Home: An Intersubjective View of Therapeutic Action, by Chris Jaenicke,  Routledge, East Sussex and New York, 2014,  114 pp.

During the 1960s, a decade in which psychoanalysis experienced a period of unprecedented dominance in the therapeutic arena, Elizabeth Zetzel, more or less singlehandedly, championed the unpopular idea of the therapeutic alliance, meaning that the patient needed to understand their own role in pursuing the goals of analysis, as a necessary component of the relationship between psychoanalyst and patient. This was in distinct contrast to the more general belief that such an alliance was detrimental to the emergence of transference and ultimately to the purported “transference neurosis” from which a cure would emerge and without which all psychoanalysis would fail to reach a deep enough level. We have come a great distance from that battle over psychoanalytic technique as the ego psychology of Zetzel and Greenson, for example, after a period of acceptance and dominance, has been challenged from several different directions perhaps the most significant being the relational intersubjective school of thinking. In this brief but intense book Chris Jaenicke introduces the reader to a radical intersubjective perspective that in itself represents an extreme version of the relational intersubjective approach to psychoanalytic therapy. His approach is deeply personal and insistent on the centrality of the analyst's subjective mental and emotional state in determining what emerges when two independent subjectivities, that of the therapist and the patient, co-mingle and influence each other. As an interpersonal-relational psychoanalyst I find much to agree with in what Jaenicke puts forward in the general sense of how much emphasis he places on the two person nature of psychoanalysis but as an experienced clinician I am skeptical about the excessively dramatic way in which he works with his patients.

In order to illustrate and illuminate his approach to treatment Jaenicke utilizes two case studies of patients whom he has worked with intensively. What is special about his writing a