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With this book, Fred Pine carries forward his work of the past ten years on the “Four Psychologies” (drive, ego, object relations, and self), now focusing on the realm of psychoanalytic technique. As a caveat by way of Truth in Reviewing, I will disclose at the outset that, influenced by
my patients and by pioneers of the multiple models approach like Pine, my own current viewpoint is quite congruent with his.
Not merely accepting the diversity of current psychoanalytic points of view as a fact, Pine clearly also celebrates it, in the belief that patients are better served by a flexible technique that entertains diverse possibilities. He argues that as psychoanalytic theory has evolved from its beginnings as a drive theory, through its phases of ego psychology, object relations, and self theories, each stage has retained its relevance, rather than having been superseded. His clinical examples illustrate his argument that “a broadened theoretical perspective provides the conceptual basis for a more balanced technique, shaped to the individual patient and the particular clinical moment” (p. 51). He makes no excuse for his multiple models position: “If we require multiple models… in order to hear patients adequately, then that is simply what the work entails” (p. 154). He argues that arriving at a particular intervention from within a four psychologies model is no more difficult than from within a unified theory. In either case, the specifics are arrived at by an empathic sense of the patient's apparent clinical needs at the given moment. No theory, unitary or otherwise, tells the clinician precisely how to address which aspect, or when to do it. In fact, Pine wonders, as do I, whether in their clinical work holders of a unitary theory may at moments quietly use other models in an adaptive way without being aware they are doing so.
In assessing the relative importance of interpretation and the relationship, Pine views them not as an either/or dichotomy, but rather as i