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Dear reader: Before reading this review you should know that I am cited in this book, and quoted once, though briefly. I will try to be as objective as I can. You be the judge of whether I have succeeded.
This may be the most practically important book on psychoanalytic therapy published this year. It amounts to an assertion that we cannot in the name of caution ignore or defer the use of modern technology in our work. The various chapters cover the subject from points of view ranging from mild disapproval of the dangers of internet addiction as a psychological illness to recommending use of the internet for treatment at the highest, or deepest, level. All of the contributors advocate that we accept, with due caution, communication via telephone and the internet as a reality that has changed what patients today, especially younger ones, find comfortable and useful. Yet most of these authors also believe that the wisdom of accepting these parameters must be further researched, discussed, and evaluated.
Most of the contributors to this volume use the phrase “face to face” to describe treatment in the analyst's or therapist's office. Yet analysis is not “face to face” when the patient lies on the couch. And it is “face to face” when both participants in the conversation are looking at each other's faces on screens that are eighteen to twenty inches in front of them. It is more intimately face to face than most conversations—at times even strangely, disturbingly so. Yet Freud's innovation of having a conversation while one person looks at the wall or the ceiling, with the other looking at the top of that person's head, was surely more strange to his patients than use of the telephone or computer is to ours. Those who consider Freud the founder of a valuable form of psychological treatment may do him the greatest honor by following his example of experimenting to find what works.
I enjoyed and learned from the clinical vignettes—from analysts, psychotherapists, and especial