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This is a fine book. It is difficult to categorize it other than as a condensed textbook of psychoanalytic psychotherapy that manages to be both a basic text and an advanced review. The author attempts, with considerable success, to touch upon all aspects of therapy, from the relevance of the personality and gender of the therapist and the initial interview, through transference and countertransference, dreams, stages of therapy, and the processes of therapeutic influences, to termination and posttermination considerations. He includes a chapter on such realities as money, office arrangement and location, telephone answering, and the like, which is the kind of discussion most beginning therapists wish someone would have had with them. There is an annotated list of suggested readings that is not only useful for the therapist in training, but a good reminder for the senior therapist of what to read again, and what basics he or she may have overlooked. One has the impression that clinical vignettes make up one-fifth to one-quarter of the text, and they bring the concepts vividly to life.
This is essentially a how-to text, and the fact that, in this reviewer's opinion, it succeeds in so densely complex a subject as psychotherapy without any sense of simplistic reductionism is thoroughly admirable. The accomplishment of this task, however, does lead to one problem. So much is covered in this relatively brief book that it takes on a somewhat encyclopedic quality. There are many subheadings—sometimes one or more to a page—and discussions under each subhead are generally brief. This impaired my sense of continuity and did not lead to sustained reading; it also imparts what eventually turns out to be a false impression that the overall substantive discussion lacks depth.
Apart from the book's general excellence, I was particularly gratified by two of its qualities. One is that the focus is uncompromisingly upon psychoanalytically based psychodynamic therapy. There is no hint o