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This is a most important book. I hope that it will receive the attention that it deserves from all who have an interest in understanding more of our contemporary scientific controversies and pluralities. All readers will emerge with a much fuller awareness of the historical evolution of many central psychoanalytic concepts and how the pendulum of emphases in the psychoanalyses, psychoanalytic psychotherapies and dynamically informed supportive psychotherapies has shifted back and forth as the frontiers of our knowledge of mental life have been pushed back. The book is also most informative about the changing understanding of the relationships between these approaches and even the different ways in which the approaches have been defined over the decades.
The particular areas chosen by Wallerstein as the central topics for this book are issues that he has spent much of his professional life addressing, for example, the changing ideas and empirical research as to the nature of the psychic changes that take place in the different therapies and what factors bring these about. I was relieved by the fact that, though most (but by no means all) of the book follows the course of development of ideas by leading psychoanalysts in the United States, it certainly did