The First Session in Brief Psychotherapy: Simon H. Budman, Michael F. Hoyt, and Steven Friedman,  The Guilford Press, New York and London, 1992,  370 pp., $35.00.

The importance of the first session in all dynamic therapies, including psychoanalysis, has been well documented. The first session (or first few sessions) is when the therapist and patient get to know one another; assess their compatibility; discuss the complaints that bring the patient to the therapist's office; outline the approach to modifying these complaints or their underlying dynamics; and set fee; time; and frequency parameters. As if this were not enough, the innovators of brief psychotherapy in the 1970s, Davanloo, Malan, and Sifneos, added two tasks, evaluation of the patient for brief psychotherapy and establishment of a therapeutic focus. Davanloo described his practice of conducting a “trial psychotherapy” in the first session to help gauge the suitability of his therapeutic method.

The format of this book consists of an introduction and a conclusion written by the editors, separated by 14 chapters by individual contributors describing and illustrating their approach to brief psychotherapy, seven individual and seven couple and family methods. Such techniques as neurolinguistic programming; rational-emotive therapy; planned single-session therapy; time-limited dynamic psychotherapy; and cognitive-behavioral therapy are represented. A notable absence is brief interpersonal therapy.

One might anticipate that such a volume would describe carefully the salient features of the first session utilizing each of these techniques, emphasizing the differences and relating them to therapeutic divergences and possibly to disparate objectives. A reader with this expectation will be disappointed. Not only is there little emphasis on differences in the handling of the initial session, but there is little highlighting of the first session itself. The one exception is the chapter on planned single-session psychotherapy, in which the first session is, of course, the whole therapy.

The individual chapters all begin with short descriptions of the techniques being discussed.