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Enrico Jones's Therapeutic Action is a truly remarkable book. I became personally acquainted with the author at a meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR) held in Vancouver perhaps ten years ago. He was presenting a paper ostensibly about a teaching technique. In fact, however, he was reporting an attempt to deal with a facet of what is perhaps the most deleterious schism in our field. In his teaching experience he had observed that psychology graduate students tend, from the beginning of their programs, to be interested in careers either in research or in clinical work, but not in a combination of the two. If that trend is present from the start of graduate work, he reasoned, it must have originated earlier-at least as early as undergraduate days. As an experiment, he had his undergraduates study transcripts of dynamic psychotherapy sessions and evaluate them using several different formal methods for systematically studying psychotherapeutic process (e.g., Luborsky's CCRT and Dahl's FRAMES). If we look at Jones's course as an experiment exploring the possibility of arousing the interest of undergraduate psychology students in psychotherapy-oriented research, the results confirm the idea that the goal can be accomplished. Indeed, the results were manifest in the room that day, in the presence of twelve undergraduate psychology students who had taken the trouble to travel from San Francisco to Vancouver to attend the meeting.
In Therapeutic Action Jones is striving to deal with the same problem, or a similar problem at a more advanced level. The book is addressed first of all to psychotherapists. It is a how-to book on psychotherapy, well suited to those beginning this pursuit. In this aspect, it takes its place in a line of classic works on psychotherapeutic technique, such as those by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Sidney Tarachow, and, at a psychoanalytic level, Otto Fenichel and Charles Brenner. It is, however, thoroughly contemporary, in the best sense,