The Therapeutic Alliance: Steven T. Levy, Madison, Connecticut:  International Universities Press, 2000,  137 pp.

Steven Levy's collection, The Therapeutic Alliance, is the latest in the workshop series of the American Psychoanalytic Association. It comprises five essays on aspects of this concept followed by discussions of the essays by Owen Renik and Morton Shane.

One question taken up by the authors is whether the notion of a therapeutic alliance is a viable concept at all. Sander Abend joins a number of classically oriented analysts in arguing that, since all aspects of psychic functioning are based on compromise formation, the assumption of a rational aspect of the patient's relationship to the analyst is not warranted. Further, he sees a potential danger in working with this concept in mind, since important areas of the patient's personality may be hidden by the mutual assumption of a “realistic” perception of the analyst, and thus go unanalyzed. Abend also warns against modifications of technique in what he considers a vain attempt to cultivate an alliance. Theodore Jacobs, writing from an intersubjective perspective, emphasizes the analysand's capacity to perceive and benefit from the analyst's human qualities such as warmth, maturity, and empathy. Agreeing with the classical assumption of the ubiquity of compromise formations, he sees the therapeutic alliance as no different from any other compromise formation. However, he believes that along with “transference, fantasies, memories and projections of self and object representations” are “quite accurate perceptions of the analysis … (which), while not free of transference … are accurate enough to give the patient an essentially undistorted reading of certain aspects of the analyst and of