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Elliot Adler and Janet Lee Bachant's Working in Depth: A Clinician's Guide to Framework and Flexibility in the Analytic Relationship is a welcome addition to the literature on the teaching and learning of psychoanalysis. The authors have produced a thoughtful—at times, luminescent—reflection on analytic process and the working life of the clinical analyst. The book's nine chapters (Getting Started; Free Association and Analytic Neutrality; Dimensions of Transference; Intrapsychic and Interactive Dimensions of Resistance; Analysis of Countertransference; Hearing the Unconscious; Interpretive Activity; Therapeutic Action; and The Analyst's Growth and Maturation) follow the trajectory of an analysis from its inception into the middle phase. Along the way, Adler and Bachant take up topics ranging from the pain accompanying real change (chapter 4) to the technical requirements of analytic listening (chapter 6) and the way that description and acknowledgment may function as clinical interventions (chapter 7).
The result is an effective teaching text, richly evocative of the challenges, tensions, and pleasures of learning to engage deeply with patients in ways that promote growth and development in both patient and analyst. The clinical vignettes present an array of ordinary treatment situations (e.g., threats to the treatment frame, intense transferences, and the analyst's narcissistic investments) in a way that is attentive to the anxiety that they may generate in young clinicians. The final chapter includes a particularly moving meditation on the emotional demands analytic practice places on analysts, their families, and their friendships. Overall, the book is well written, clearly conceptualized, and oriented to the pragmatics of clinical practice, making it suitable for analytic candidates as well as for medical residents and interns in clinical psychology and social work.