A Response to Gofine's Critical Presentation of Our Book

All criticism is welcome, especially if it is in good faith and particularly if it touches on the essence of the question. This criticism, however, gives rise to some doubts about its motivation and its objectives.

 Countertransference in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents (reviewed in this journal,  6 (1): 165-6)↗ consists of texts by European analysts and analytical psychotherapists from various countries who work from different theoretical standpoints and belong to different schools of psychoanalysis. Some people such as Dr. Gofine may see this as a disadvantage; for others it is an advantage, in that it enables one of the central themes of interest in psychoanalytical literature to be presented from a variety of different angles. Indeed, such an approach is among the objectives of the publications of the European Federation for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

Whenever Gofine identifies something positive about the book, he immediately hastens to cancel it out, regardless of whether or not the arguments are of equal weight. In paragraph 2, for example, after he identifies “a personal, intimate style that can be refreshing” from a “panel of distinguished and experienced contributors” who present their case with a “flair in language and ideas that describe abundant clinical material” (165), he attempts to negate his observation by pointing out two lines of what he calls “obscure writing” in the text by one of the authors.

Dr. Gofine concludes that “the contributors do not have the novice clinician on this side of the Atlantic in mind.” That may well be the case for numerous schools of psychoanalytic thought in Europe, or for many of the books and periodicals published in the U.S.A., for that matter. Let us hope it is not intended to mean, as could be inferred, that anything, which does not promote the views of a specific school, ought to be rejected wholesale.