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Many roads lead to becoming a psychotherapist and/or a psychoanalyst. No one who finds the quality or abundance of the training available satisfactory along these existent roads will wish to read this book. It is about the creation of a new profession, psychotherapy, and the establishment of interdisciplinary but independent professional schools for the training of psychotherapists. Ideally, such schools would be in university settings and would relate with medical and social-work schools, as well as with relevant graduate departments. The curriculum would retain relevant aspects of courses given in medicine, social work, and psychology, and would discard that which is not pertinent to the job of the psychotherapist. Many chapters emphasize producing motivation and competence in the psychotherapy field with all sorts of people in many different settings, not in private practice alone.
This brief overview of the theme and purpose of the book does scant justice to the detailed contents of the chapters themselves. Robert Holt has done not only a marvelous job of editing raw material into interesting, clear, and forceful articles, but he has himself reviewed and summarized the contents and added much that is new of his own in a final chapter, entitled “Summary and Prospect: The Dawn of a New Profession,” completed apparently in 1970.
The other chapters are edited papers from an interdisciplinary conference held in 1963 at New York University's Gould House on “An Ideal Training Program for Psychotherapists.” Publication was unavoidably delayed until 1971, but as Holt writes in his Preface, “In some ways I believe the book is more timely now than it would have been, had it appeared 5 years ago. The movement begun by Kubie has gathered momentum, and the whole mental-health field seems to be on the verge of rapid change, perhaps leading to fundamental reorganization.”
In the final chapter, Holt tells us in considerable detail the many kinds of developments between 1963 and 197