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If, as is stated in the first chapter of this book, patients are demonstrating a tendency to short-term utilization of mental health services, the mushrooming interest in brief psychotherapy in recent years is easily understandable. Indeed, in 1975, Judd Marmor reported that the average number of visits to private nonanalytic psychiatrists was 26. This volume has the ambitious goal of presenting brief approaches to various forms of traditional therapy. Thus, the book considers not only individual psychotherapy, whose therapeutic theory differs markedly from that utilized in open-ended, long-term, one-to-one psychotherapy, but also includes sections on behavior therapy, group therapy, and family and marital therapy. In these latter categories, little theoretical modification is needed for therapies which are already not lengthy to come under the arbitrary 25-session limit by which Budman defines brief psychotherapy.
This book is of the editor-contributor genre, and has chapters which are uneven in quality, as well as in the level of reader experience and familiarity with the subject required. While all the chapters are of interest, only those most relevant to psychoanalytic practice will receive attention in this review.
The section on dynamic models of individual brief therapy deals with therapeutic applications of psychoanalytic personality theory. In the first two chapters, James Mann presents his “time-limited psychotherapy” and Peter Sifneos his “short-term anxiety-provoking psychotherapy.” These chapters will be useful and interesting to those who are unfamiliar with these authors and will serve as a review and summary to those who are acquainted with their writings. Mann tends to define pathology in terms of time. He states, for example, that “In depressed patients, there is an overwhelming sense of everything being past, so there is no present, and a future seems impossible. In the opposite state, the manic episode, time past, present, and future rush upon the