Intensive Family Therapy: Edited by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and James L. Framo (New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Pp. 507).

Nietzsche wrote, "A thinking man must not have a good memory." His advice is applicable to a psychoanalyst who seeks to understand an approach to psychology which is not based on the observation of a single individual. If one can at least temporarily forget his usual frame of reference, the book, Intensive Family Therapy, offers not only a detailed description of a new observational technique but also a theoretical approach to the phenomenology of interpersonal transactions which Nagy has developed from a correlation of psychoanalytic writings with existensialist philosophers, and especially Buber. This book contains contributions by fifteen authors which were written for this publication, and the experiences of the Family Therapy Project at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute are dealt with most thoroughly.

An opening chapter by Zuk and Rubenstein, which reviews the concepts in the study and treatment of families of schizophrenics, and a chapter in which Framo describes the current status of systematic research on family dynamics present a comprehensive review of the literature up to the time of publication. The degree of sophistication of the observers of family interaction varies from a naive oversimplification in some workers to a cautious withholding of final judgments in others. Many descriptions of family interactions that are said to result in schizophrenia would also apply to families in which psychosis is not found. The core concept in family psychotherapy is that mental illness in an individual is an aspect of a greater interlocking family pathology. In the studies which are reviewed in the first chapter, it is shown that emphasis has shifted away from the concept of a pathogenic parent to the pathogenic family