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This book is the outcome of experiments in the treatment of neuroses undertaken by a number of members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society during the last war. It represents one of the many ways in which the experiences of fully-fledged psycho-analytic treatment can be applied to brief psychotherapy. It has the great advantage of being written by someone who is himself a psycho-analyst and thoroughly familiar both with the technique and its concepts.
This method aims at goal-limited adjustment, and has developed its therapeutic procedure, called 'Sector Therapy', from an interviewing technique which has been described as 'associative anamnesis'. This means that the approach aims at uncovering less conscious material by letting the patient drift into a kind of thought production under relaxed conscious control. Certain words are pressed home for further associated ideas from the patient, for instance, because they have been repeatedly used or appear to have a special meaning. The therapeutic approach is meant to remain centred around certain symptoms or conflicts. The therapist uses confrontation of the patient with the material produced by him, in preference to interpretation. Many further technical hints are given, which the experienced psycho-analyst knows more by way of episodes during full psycho-analytic treatment. The theory of this therapy stresses a kind of thinning out of cathexis by displacement, and a loosening up of chains of association. 'The dissolution of these chains and replacement by new ones is, in fact, the therapeutic process.' Confession in symbolic language, which may be unnoticeably transformed into the real meaning, is recognized as a potent factor. Transference and its handling, which is one of the key problems of all these brief forms of psychotherapy, is not much mentioned, and certainly an analysis of the transference situation is not contemplated. But it is noticeable how, albeit implicitly, Felix Deutsch reverts to the soci