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Brilliantly synthesizing a variety of ideas relevant to describing and justifying the interpretive process in psychoanalysis, Philip Rubovits-Seitz has written a book that should be of great interest to both clinicians and researchers. He begins with historical background underscoring Freud's relative neglect of the methodology of interpretation and its problems, a fact noted by Glover and others. Of major importance is the recent paradigm shift in general science from a positivist to a postpositivist perspective, the latter a stance that supports the compatibility of the interpretive approach with modern science. Later chapters deal with post-Freudian models comparing methods of interpretation in clinical and nonclinical fields. Rubovits-Seitz then turns, in a chapter that provides balanced treatment of Grünbaum's critique of psychoanalysis, to the problem of justifying interpretations. One of his most important contributions is an elaboration of what he calls the method of “recurrent cycles” first proposed by Thomas French.
“French discovered that the therapeutic process follows repetitive dynamic cycles that become steadily shorter (that is, the cycles are completed more rapidly) as the treatment progresses—a form of organized interlocking microstructure that the writer uses in conjunction with other validating methods to justify interpretations and reconstructions” (p. 249). Rubovits-Seitz notes that many cases do not reveal such a neat pattern of cycles, and it is a matter for future empirical research whether such cycles can be reliably identified. The method involves examining a process notes record of a completed therapy and, starting from the end, attempting to identify a cycle (a sequence of steps) that can be identified as repeated throughout the course of the treatment. A chapter is devoted to a detailed illustration of the method with the case of a thirty-eight-year-old married man whose recurrent cycle displays