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This book is a sequel to the author's previous publication on the alternative therapies: Out in Inner Space — A Psychoanalyst Explores the New Therapies. There Appelbaum took the reader on a delightful tour of EST, Gestalt Therapy, Rolfing, Primal Scream, and several other methods of intervention roughly grouped under the rubric of “the Human Potential Movement.” With disarming frankness and humor, he revealed how spending time in the environment of these newer therapies as a kind of experimental patient enlarged his consciousness, exposed previously obscure aspects of his personality in surprising ways, and left him with the impression that they had something to offer the patient not to be found in formal psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy.
A well trained analyst and research member of the staff of the Menninger Clinic, Appelbaum approached his explorations out in inner-space with a kind of romantic derring-do clothed in the guise of research. However, after each burst of enthusiasm on first contact with a seemingly far-out technique, he would return to Topeka, Kansas, examine his feelings and experiences with more objectivity, and conclude that though there was something to be said for the benefits of the various techniques for certain kinds of patients, much of their claim to an advantage over psychoanalysis — and, indeed, their hostility to psychoanalytic methods — was overstated or based on ignorance of how psychoanalysis actually works. Nevertheless, he ended with the recommendation that psychoanalysts should, on their side, not reject the newer therapies out of hand. Rather, they should familiarize themselves with these alternative techniques and in some circumstances incorporate them into their own styles of intervention.
In this new book, Appelbaum has reviewed his experience of the contrast between psychoanalysis and the alternative therapies with the scholarly apparatus of theory, conceptualization, and wide-ranging references to the literature. Focus