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CERTAINLY A MAJOR CHALLENGE for contemporary psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically oriented practice is that of integrating the multiplicity of theory and treatment models now confronting us. In responding to the challenge, the alternatives of retreat into orthodox rigidity or abandonment to an unfettered relativism are equally unappealing. A paralysed, throwing-up-one's-hands inability to respond is hardly much better. To the great benefit of everyone in the field, Fred Pine has been struggling with this challenge for several years. Although he would undoubtedly agree with Schafer's (1990) proposal “to give up on the idea of a single master text and instead to celebrate and study our differences” (p. 52), he has moved beyond celebration to the work of integration. What he has offered has been intelligent, comprehensive, subtle, and usable. The volume under review continues and builds on his earlier work of integration, especially Drive, Ego, Object, and Self: A Synthesis for Clinical Work (1990). Whereas both volumes deal with theory and technique, the emphasis in the first was on theory, the emphasis in the new book on technique.
The “four-psychologies” approach developed in the 1990 work, and in the earlier Developmental Theory and Clinical Practice (1985), continues to inform this new work. As in the earlier works, the four theories of