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By its title, Dr. Waska's latest book indicates that it is a primer on Kleinian thinking. If one had a professional education in psychotherapy (as many therapists do nowadays) or even in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a therapist will welcome its refreshing creativity in doing Kleinian work as well as the easy language and brevity used to describe Kleinian theory. But even more experienced therapists will find his case studies intriguing and exciting to read as he describes the use of Kleinian thinking in practice. His work uses case formulations of the larger and often hidden issues that various clients face. And in a more granular way, he introduces unique terms to describe his concepts of the stages that the work progresses through. In contrast to case reports in the literature which go into considerable detail about a couple of specific interventions, he tends to look at his patients in terms of their global issues with his interpretations and again at different moments of their therapy. So we see how the therapy develops over time as the therapy progresses from one issue to the next.
Dr. Waska has developed apparently simple terminology to summarize his work and so the reader does not have to be informed ahead of time about Klein. On the other hand, a Kleinian has to do some translating and the terms may seem unfamiliar at first although the language is simple enough. For example, he adopts the terms “naming, claiming, and taming” to describe the stages of the developing work. By this, I believe he means to say that projective identification (PI) at first requires identifying the initially unconscious processes that are occurring (“names”). Then the patient is encouraged to take conscious ownership of their “claims.” Once that happens, one can “tame” their familiar anxiety- and depression-triggered reactions by adopting intentional choices to counter them. He likens each step respectively to “containment, interpretation, and integration” (p. 2); this introductory