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This book is by a psychoanalyst who has also been involved with group work (especially Bion), as well as marital and family work. He has written several books, papers and chapters on brief psychotherapy before and runs the Brief Psychotherapy Clinic at Wisconsin University where he is a professor. He evidently developed a late interest in Jung.
It is written in an extremely dogmatic style, and the author throws around epithets like ‘malignant’ and ‘benign’ as if they were legal tender. He uses labels like ‘paranoid’ and ‘borderline’ with great freedom as if there were no questions about their application. He regards some patients as being impossible, and fails to entertain the possibility that they are only impossible within the confines of a rigid system of treatment.
Often there is an incredible oversimplification, such as when the author quotes with approval Beels's comment that schizophrenia was a housing problem. ‘By this he meant that schizophrenics did best in small boarding-houses where they could keep their distance, such as from dinner table conversation, yet there was always somebody up to have some slight company’ (p. 18). This seems to me a custodial approach which has little to do with psychotherapy.