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This is not just a book. It is the first issue of a new journal, so that it embodies more than its contents. Its publication carries the assertion that there is, and will continue to be, a need (market) for such a journal. So the concept and the intention of the enterprise are of some interest. A statement of policy at the end of this volume describes the new venture, as follows:
The Review of Physioanalytic Books: An International Journal is an independent quarterly journal of critically evaluative reviews of books and other media relevant to psychoanalysis. Its coverage is not intended to be limited to books on traditional psychoanalytic topics but will encompass, as well, published material in a wide range of disciplines and on a variety of subjects that impinge on the ever-widening scope of the psychoanalytic endeavor.
This volume consists of 20 long reviews (average six pages) and 13 brief reviews (average one page).
The 20 books reviewed at greater length include six which I would describe as primarily clinicial. Only one of these limits itself to the traditional psychoanalytic situation; the others deal with special applications of psychoanalytic principles and concepts to a range of clinical problems in a range of psychotherapeutic settings. Of the books which are reviewed more briefly, at least eight appear to be clinical in orientation, all of them 'special', either in the sense that they are about a particular application of psychotherapy (not psychoanalysis), e.g. grief counselling, group psychotherapy, or therapy for women, or 'special' in the sense that the book represents one man's ideas about psychotherapy. The reviewers repeatedly point out the hazards inherent in therapies—and in professions—organized around partial or idiosyncratic theories of personality, its development and its alteration. My impression is that for the most part these reviews are appropriately brief.
I mention the clinical presentations under review in this first issue bec