The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process, by Frank Summers,  Routledge, London and New York, 2013,  224 pp.

Psychoanalysis has from its beginning been concerned with how the mind works both in healthy and disturbed individuals. Throughout the course of its development psychoanalysts have stayed true to the therapeutic goal of relieving their patients of unnecessary suffering while adhering to a variety of theories that differ radically in their view of what goes wrong with patients and how to address our understanding of what constitutes therapeutic action in the analytic dyad. While differing theories have those who follow them with strict and consistent adherence there is also a growing, perhaps preponderant, tendency among psychoanalysts to use, either in combination or serially, many if not all theories with the insistence that such combinations or alternating of theories is either more effective therapeutically or enhancing of their analytic functioning. Hence, the conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the use and place of psychoanalytic theory has continued to yield competing but fragmented versions of psychoanalysis that combine incompatible theories in the service of pragmatism. This tendency to integrate incompatible theoretical orientations is apparent in the writing of many psychoanalysts when they attempt to describe