Psychotherapy and Medication: The Challenge of Integration. By Fredric N. Busch and Larry S. Sandberg. New York:  The Analytic Press, 2007,  177 pp., $39.95.

As early as the 1980s, the use of medications in conjunction with psychoanalysis was considered antithetical to the psychoanalytic process. At that time the traditional concerns about using medication and psychoanalysis together had to do largely with a medication's effect in reducing the analysand's symptoms. Symptom reduction from medication was thought to decrease an analysand's motivation for treatment, lead to symptom substitution, and inhibit the capacity of an analyst to observe conflict-laden material, that is, the unconscious sources of the disorder of which the symptoms were simply the epiphenomena (Swioskin 2001a, p. 144).

However, in 1991 the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society each held investigative panels in which the theoretical orientation in this regard significantly shifted toward the use of medication in the psychoanalytic process. These panels challenged traditional psychoanalytic views on this subject and were the forerunners to contemporary views supporting the use of psychotropic substances in psychoanalysis.