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When an experienced psychoanalyst produces a well-written, intense, and insistent book on his view of proper psychoanalytic technique, it is bound to attract readers who are eager to compare the author's view with their own, to monitor similarities and differences in approach, and to consider the usefulness of the book for teaching technique to new
candidates in psychoanalytic training. Further, if the author presents his or her argument in a fashion that leaves little room for competing theories of psychoanalysis, with their inevitable impact on technique, then a new source of stimulation for thought and debate about psychoanalytic theory and technique has been launched. The Ego at the Center of Clinical Technique is a book destined to have an importance in psychoanalytic debate and education. In producing this lucid picture of a modern, ego psychologically based version of psychoanalytic technique, Fred Busch challenges psychoanalysts of different perspectives to respond to his ideas.
At a time when many psychoanalysts are changing their approach to the psychoanalytic dyad by emphasizing the importance of the real person and subjectivity of the psychoanalyst in the analytic process, Busch chooses to pursue the modernization of the classical Freudian, one-person view of psychoanalysis, with its “blank as possible” screen model of the analyst. It is both a strength and a weakness of this book that Busch deals so little with the major trends in psychoanalysis calling for its redefinition both as theory and as technique. The strength of Busch's approach is that his isolation from these trends leaves him free to address what he believes to be the core of a psychoanalytic experience—namely, the patient's increasing ability to understand intrapsychic mental functioning not through the decreased influence of unconscious conflicts but through the patient's increased awareness of previously unconscious ego defenses. The promotion of autonomy from the analyst in the