The Psychoanalytic Process: Theory, Clinical Observation, and Empirical Research: By Joseph Weiss, Harold Sampson, and the Mount Zion Psychotherapy Research Group. New York: The Guilford Press. 1986. Pp. 423.

Within one volume, Weiss, Sampson and the Mount Zion Psychotherapy Research Group have offered us two distinct books. One is a casebook of systematic research into the psychoanalytic process, that in the compelling logic of its methodology and the clarity of its methods and designs both demonstrates just how feasible scientific research into subjectivistic psychological and psychotherapeutic processes can be and at the same time sets an enviable standard for future clinical psychotherapy research to live up to.

This research programme, described through many carefully detailed empirical presentations, carries many significances. It is clearly research on the psychoanalytic process itself, which, after all, always has been and most probably will continue to be the main data source for the accrual of continuing psychoanalytic knowledge, knowledge of both the normal and the abnormal functioning of the human mind, and knowledge of how changes in that functioning come about or are brought about. It is research within the psychoanalytic situation upon many observable, recurring, and critical phenomena which are of direct interest to the psychoanalytic clinician and theorist—the conditions under which previously repressed or warded off mental contents come to consciousness, the way transference demands are expressed by the analysand and experienced by the analyst, the way the analyst's responses and interventions within the analytic situation in turn shape the patient's experiences and subsequent responses, the way interpretations are reacted to, and the way insight is acquired. It is a set of research designs that is both original and rigorously conceived. Actually, it is not hyperbole to state that the studies presented in this volume have been executed with as much rigour as has been attained by any studies attempting to encompass the multifaceted complexity of the overall determinants and of the major change agents operative over the sweep of the clinical psychoana