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Dr Ehrenberg is a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City. She has also written and lectured widely. This book is the distillation of her private practice extending over more than 20 years. As the title proclaims, the focus of her work is the detailed intimate interaction between patient and analyst, and she has a unique approach to this aspect of analytic work.
Many analysts have written about the importance of the transference - countertransference interaction, but to a varying extent they all remain loyal to the classic Freudian concept of the analyst observer using transference and countertransference as tools in the application of a learned technique. What is different about Dr Ehrenberg's approach is that she sets the intimate personal interaction centre stage. With admirable simplicity she replaces the complex Freudian stance with the concept of equality of interaction. The reader is challenged to consider how far this approach can be the dominant mode, and to ask how it fits, or fails to fit, other ways of conceptualising the therapeutic relationship. There are 25 clinical pictures of varying length in the book. The author has a gift for simple effective description of clinical situations. Her mastery of her technique is surely a major factor in her ability to give such telling descriptions.
The author quotes a neglected Freud text of 1913: “It is a very remarkable thing that the unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through consciousness”. She refers to Sullivan and Ferenczi as pioneers in describing the importance of the nonverbal aspects of the therapeutic relationship. She is firmly rooted in her psychoanalytic background and nearly all her references are to standard texts. She does not minimise the importance of verbal communications. At every point she speaks about what she sees as the significance of the events that are happening, and in this way she gives her pati