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This expansive book is a summing up of the thoughts of a humanistic psychoanalyst after half a century of clinical practice, teaching, and research. Throughout this work Dr Shor shares some of his personal experiences with psychoanalytic training, and some of the psychoanalysts he has worked with (Kris, Reik, and Balint). While not always well integrated with the rest of the material, it makes for fascinating reading. According to Shor, after two years of training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1940s, he was asked to leave when he refused to sign a document that stated he would neither call himself a 'psychoanalyst' nor call what he was practising 'psychoanalysis'. Being asked to sign such a document was common practice for the first Ph.D.s admitted to American Institutes.
Shor then founded a psychoanalytic training centre with Reik, and went on to work with Balint after a break with Reik. Publishing on psychoanalytic topics for the last fifty years, Shor's work has, nonetheless, remained on the fringes of 'mainstream' psychoanalysis. While some may thrive under such conditions, I do not believe this has been the case with Shor. Although I admire his creative energies and his ongoing educational efforts, I believe Shor's work would have benefited from some rigorous challenging. It only makes the recent moves of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations to make training more available for non-medical individuals that much more welcome. It is tempting to speculate on the creative challenges Shor may have brought to psychoanalysis if he had continued his training uninterrupted.
While there is much to be learned from Shor, the flawed nature of his presentation, along with the vagueness of the theoretical underpinnings of his work, would probably make the rewards of reading this book too meagre for most psychoanalysts. The value in Shor's work lies in its reminder to psychoanalysts of the parameters in the patient-analyst relatio