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This interesting book draws from the author's extensive clinical experience, work as a supervisor, and theoretical exchanges with colleagues, young psychotherapists, and mental health professionals in general. It is a courageous and timely book. It is courageous because it dares to face, from a novel and suggestive viewpoint, a thorny question that increasingly affects psychoanalysts—the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It is timely, because it does not merely enumerate all the problems derived from this relationship, but also contributes new ideas, such as the application of psychodynamic indicators, a very useful technical tool in the clinical practice of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts.
The author agrees with those who, especially since Balint and Balint (1961) are perplexed by the scarcity of in-depth essays in psychoanalytic literature on the need for a proper interviewing technique. He then explores and thoroughly analyzes with commendable scientific rigor one of the questions that both psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals have to answer most frequently—that of the circumstances that call for a psychoanalytically oriented treatment. He does so in such an exhaustive and didactic way that he transforms his text into a very valuable and original handbook on the nature and technique of the interview, both in public institutions and in private practice. The text helps us define the type of problem, the profile of the patient's personality, and the kind of treatment best suited for each patient. This is one of the reasons why it is an extremely useful book, not just for novice or recently trained psychotherapists, but also for very experienced psychoanalysts.
The text is easily read and engaging, and it constantly brings us into contact with clinical practice. Even though the author openly ascribes to a Freudian—Kleinian— Bionian frame of reference, he uses a language that is accessible to readers from any theor