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Walter Bonime, M.D., is one of the pioneers of our discipline. He is 84 years of age, still in active practice, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst in the Psychoanalytic Training Division of the Department of Psychiatry, New York Medical College, where he is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry. His 1962 volume on The Clinical Use of Dreams is still studied by contemporary students, clinicians, teachers, and researchers. He has written extensively, and the present volume includes selected papers on such topics as anxiety, depression, paranoia, dreams, and additional essays on psychoanalytic writing, intellectual insight, the therapeutic relationship, and competitiveness and human potential.
This collection of essays ranges from a 1953 paper on brief psychotherapy to two contributions that appeared in 1986. In a clear, uncomplicated “Foreword,” Otto Allen Will, Jr., M.D., writes that Bonime's book is valuable to him “as a therapist and a person interested in the complexities of human behavior” (p. 9). It is not a series of papers on diverse topics that interest only psychoanalysts, but can be read by all mental health professionals who wish to gain further insights about themselves, their patients, and the dilemmas that confront their students.
Dr. Bonime's frame of orientation “refers to a psychoanalytic approach that (1) considers personality as a product of a culture and its formation as basically a process of interpersonal experience; (2) assumes this continuing process is crucially influenced by constitutionally determined variations in styles and capacities for learning and sensory and physical activity; and (3) regards the developed personality as functioning consciously or unconsciously in terms of learned values” (p. 326). As our clinical researchers demonstrate, the “internal” is of crucial importance, but the “external” focus on relationships demands a hearing. We need not rigidly adhere to only one set of theoretical variables, even though one or a com