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Although interesting to students new to the clinical endeavor, Patrick Casement's most recent book, Learning from Our Mistakes, seems more useful and ultimately intended for the experienced clinician, as evidenced by the overarching question in his Epilogue: “Are we getting near to where patients most need us to get?” (, p. 126). Casement then concludes with two questions that he believes—based on his own experience with patients—are most fundamental:
Are we finding ways that truly free the mind and creativity of those who come to us for analysis or therapy?
Do we adequately guard against the danger of turning others into some version of our own selves, so that they then come to see themselves as we have been seeing them?
Given his career-long project of paying close attention to his patients, Casement's return to these two questions on the eve of his retirement commands our attention.
Peter Fonagy, in his 1985 review of Patrick Casement's first book, On Learning from the Patient, called it “an excellent textbook.” Indeed, this book (and its American version, which includes Casement's first and second books that were initially published in the UK) has often been used in introductory courses covering contemporary psychoanalytic technique. In it, he introduces an approach to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy driven by careful attention to the patient's communications and the therapist-patient interaction, rather than by theory, which for him has to be discovered and then rediscovered through experience with patients, supervisors, and supervisees. Not surprisingly, Casement chose to be a member of the independent