Owen Renik does not propose to waste time. With his first sentence, “By now, the term practical psychoanalysis has become an oxymoron,” Renik makes the essential point of his entire volume. Classical psychoanalysis, he believes with many others, is not practical, and is, indeed, obsolete. As will examined more carefully below, practical psychoanalysis is a treatment that “aims to help the patient feel less distress, and more satisfaction in dealing with daily life through improved understanding of how the minds works.”