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Here are several ways I could start this review: This is a book I wish I had written and many of you will wish the same; this is the finest account of psychotherapy technique that I have read in decades; this book is written lucidly, eruditely; this is several books integrated into one; this is a lifetime's work. Yet my review and its conclusion are simple: Buy and read this book; you will become a better therapist.
If between my introduction and conclusion, my words don't convince you to read the book, then the fault is mine, not the author's.
Frattaroli's book is a review of the basic, humanistic stance of psychoanalytic therapy: we all have unconscious lives that can drive us; we have within us a drive toward growth, life, and betterment; and that a practiced manner of listening—evenly-hovering attention—to another and to oneself, to words and wordless feelings, can help someone master the trade winds of their inner lives, to trim one's sails and set one's own course.
This soul-healing book really encompasses several books, each standing alone, yet integrated. As I write this during the Passover, Frattaroli's book reminds me of the Jewish sound of praise that goes like this; “Had god taken us out of Egyptian slavery, that would have been enough; had he taken us through the desert, that would have been enough; had he given us the torah, that would have been enough” … and so on until its conclusion: He did all these things and this is enough.
Had Frattaroli only written a book on psychoanalytic technique understandable by the lay person, this would have been enough; had he only written about our historical search for meaning from Plato to the present, this would have been enough; had he written an elegant account of how an analytic impasse was overcome by the analyst's self-analysis, this would have been enough; had he tried to resolve the debate about pharmacological versus humanistic approaches to feelings, this would have been enough. Yet he does these and more.
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