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This is a fascinating but difficult book. The text is a series of transcribed, audiotaped dialogues held during 1976 and 1977 between Robert Langs and Leo Stone. They range over a variety of topics, centering on clinical and methodological issues of the utmost importance to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. With two such protagonists as Stone and Langs, these dialogues should not be overlooked by advanced students and practitioners. At the same time, I must add that although the statements are often incisive, sometimes even aphoristic, they are also discursive, argumentative, and repetitive. The dialogues have been edited, but they have not been sufficiently pruned and organized for the benefit of the reader. The book, for this reviewer, is one that can be read in only small portions at a time. It is, however, a volume of consequence, despite its polarized or polemic quality.
In greatest part the dialogues have to do with the ground rules of the therapeutic setting—in Langs' term, the "frame." This includes such basics as the use of the couch, the setting of fees, the schedule of and responsibility for appointments, and the "analytic incognito." The discussion progresses through concepts of transference and countertransference. The material summarizes many of the views Stone has expressed in his classic The Psychoanalytic Situation(1961) and in his other writings. Langs presents the adaptational-interactional perspective he has expounded in his many publications.
There is a prompt and clearly defined polarization of viewpoints over the matter of the frame. Langs maintains "that once the analyst does make a modification in technique … the patient wishes for more … to the point of frustration and then rage" (pp. 59-60). The argument leads thence to his assertion that the patient exploits such modifications and that "very often it turns out that there has been some corrupt element in a modification of the frame" (p. 225). This entails a transference-counter