Book Notices

THE TECHNIQUE AND PRACTICE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: Volume I. By Ralph R. Greenson. New York: International Universities Press, 1967, xv + 452 pp., $12.50.

The extraordinary combination of comprehensiveness, scope, and lucid theoretical underpinning with the most luminous clinical illustrations contained in this book compels us to depart from the standard procedure of presenting brief synopses of content in this section without critical comment. There is little doubt that this promises to be the definitive work on psychoanalytic technique. There is not a single aspect of the subject which is not treated in the fullest and clearest detail, combining explicitness with uncompromising profundity. The author is never unaware of questions which may be left unanswered by his illustrations and elucidations. His pedagogic purpose is apparent throughout. One of the evidences is the appearance of additional reading lists at the end of each chapter. There is a fluidity and a flexibility throughout which preclude any possibility of finding in this book a set of rules, or of accusing the author of rigidity and "orthodoxy."

PROJECTIVE TESTING AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: Selected Papers. By Roy Schafer. New York: International Universities Press, 1967, viii + 229 pp., $5.50.

For the author, this collection of his papers is "a record of a series of explorations—of increasing complexity, ambiguity and difficulty—that have, I believe, heightened my own sensibility and may do the same for others." For Schafer, clinical "sensibility" is akin to artistic sensitivity and an absolutely essential attribute of the clinical psychologist whose approach is not merely confusedly eclectic or of the "common-sense" variety. By his own account, the author progresses in the series of papers embodied in this book toward increasingly "subtle aspects of subjective experience and the organization of personality" both regressive and integrative. The papers themselves, published between 1952 and 1960, reve