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This volume attempts many things: it is clearly a primer, a collection of introductory essays on psychoanalytic technique that are well documented and that will be of use to psychoanalytic candidates who wish for an informed overview of the evolution of psychoanalytic technique. These essays contain a heavy emphasis on what Josephs understands as a fundamental organising principle: a ‘dialectic’, expressed as the tension between opposing views of ‘character analysis’ on the one hand, and ‘empathy’ on the other. Throughout the volume there is intermingled, in addition, a philosophical essay focused on the dilemma that modern vs. postmodernist perspectives pose for psychoanalytic theory and technique; the author constantly poses one point of view against another, stating, re-stating, and often stating again the conflicts in theory and technique that are produced if we shift our view of the nature of the issue. It's a ‘Rashomon’ story, in which we are constantly shifting lenses to view and re-view the scene in question. Josephs' overarching effort to examine, re-examine, compare and contrast, evaluate and re-evaluate