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Deepening the Treatment is an interesting book that reads like a novel. Its author, Jane Hall, is intense, dedicated, and largely orthodox in her technique. She is, I suspect, a fine analyst. She obviously loves her work and believes in her craft, and communicates this to her patients and students. Her book is an excellent text for the fledgling analyst. Unfortunately, while everything she writes is true (oh, how true!), she
has little to say to the experienced practitioner. “This book,” she writes, “is meant to assist the psychoanalytically informed therapist in thinking about interpreting transference, countertransference, resistance, dreams, fantasies, and actions while helping her work in concert with the patient who will increasingly take over these interpreting functions” (pp. 1-2). To me, her “psychoanalytically informed therapist” does not sound so very “informed.” Nevertheless, the book is recommended reading for students of psychotherapy, and should be assigned reading for beginners' classes.
While an ardent believer in the rule of abstinence in treatment, Hall contends that theory is secondary to the person, and that useful as it is, “theory must become the ground to the figure of the patient” (p. 47). She quotes her longtime supervisor, Martin Nass, to the effect that “the patient writes the theory” (p. 9). For example, Hall will often accept an individual on a once-a-week basis if he or she is not yet ready for analysis. In a nice turn of phrase, she says many people coming for weekly therapy “often have little idea that their presenting problems are just the first few bars of their song” (p. 2) and that “people often need to wade rather than dive directly into deep water” (p. 3).
In an orthodox manner, Hall does not believe in answering questions in analysis, even on such matters as to where she is going on vacation. According to her, “answering questions takes away the patient's right to wonder and to explore her own fantasies” (p. 15). She sticks to