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An overview, exploration and celebration of her life's work, Sandra Beuchler's book is a passionate exegesis about what she believes to be the core
and curative potential of the therapeutic relationship. This work, published as volume eight in a series entitled Psychoanalysis in a New Key, with series editor Donnel Stern, is Beuchler's second in this series: she also authored volume I: Clinical Values: Emotions that Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment. Communicating a very intimate and vivid sense of her work as an analyst, Buechler describes emotion theory and how it shapes her interpersonal perspective, and proposes that a full understanding and deployment of therapeutic impact is best served from within this framework. She draws on C.E. Izard's work in describing a biologically encoded series of distinct emotions and “the fundamental belief that each emotion deserves to be understood as a different human experience.” (p. xiii) She sets forth what she believes are the potentially transformative aspects of treatment, and builds upon her view of therapy as contrast, relational challenge, and catalyst. Her voice is a lively. honest, and compelling one, and at times quite moving, as she weaves together an exposition of her theoretical principles and techniques with clinical scenarios, moments from poetry and literature, and meditations about mortality.
Buechler accomplishes three major tasks very effectively. She clearly describes emotion theory and shows how it serves as the scaffold and spirit of her interpersonal approach. She presents an extremely fine-grained, thoughtful and almost jarringly intimate view of the nuances of the transference and countertransference feelings that can arise in treatment, in supervision, and in psychoanalytic training situations. Her observations about supervision in particular are thoughtful contributions that should be required reading for those on either side of the supervisory dyad. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, she lays fort