You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This somewhat mistitled and encyclopedic book is extremely difficult to review because of its nature and content. Robert Wallerstein, M.D., emeritus professor and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute has combined his extensive reading notes with a large number of quotations from a variety of authors in order to produce this textbook. It is not a book that can be read easily, as the reader eventually finds the innumerable author names and quotations swimming around in his or her head. To avoid this, Wallerstein has sensibly divided the work into a series of 26 mercifully short chapters so that the book may be read slowly and profitably, a chapter at a time. He has also arranged the material in a more or less historical sequence, which is useful, adds to the clarity of the presentation, and sustains the reader's interest.
The book is subdivided into five major sections: The Emergence of Psychoanalysis and of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; The Eras of Consensus and of Fragmentation; The Transference, Transference Interpretation, and the Transference Neurosis; The Psychoanalytic—and Psychotherapeutic—Relationships; and Contemporary Developments and Issues. Each major subdivision has between four and six short chapters. The central topic of the book, as Wallerstein repeatedly tells us, is the relationship of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to psychoanalysis, and the rationale for this focus is given by Wallerstein as “the now fully accepted pluralism of theoretical perspectives or metapsychologies… basically both destabilizes the psychoanalytic psychotherapies and psychoanalysis and makes their similarities and differences less clear” (p. xiv). What Wallerstein calls the “dialectical interplay between stern efforts to expunge or deny suggestion as an influence within psychoanalysis and, on the other hand, the willingness t