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This is an important and badly needed book, dealing as it does with a not just markedly unresolved, but an also strangely unattended, major handicap to both clinical and theoretical advance in psychoanalysis. What is centrally at issue here is the continuing problem in our psychoanalytic discourse of achieving consensual agreement in our understanding of the meanings of the clinical presentations in our consulting rooms, and of the formulation then of appropriate interpretations that will convey those understandings usefully to our patients.
However much our clinical and theoretical advances over recent decades have brought additional emphases in our conceptualization of mutative factors in our clinical endeavors, and have dislodged the zealous quest for veridical interpretation from its earlier primacy, as the almost unitary road to psychoanalytic change, we still, just about all of us, do, as Dale Boesky reminds us throughout this volume, offer interpretations to our patients, based on our presumed understanding of the presenting psychoanalytic situation, in our effort to help our patients understand themselves better. And we do this, all the while knowing that it is a commonplace of our field that different analysts regularly disagree in their conceptualization of what is salient in the clinical moment, whether under discussion in case conference, or presented in the literature.