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Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Clinical Manual was developed by Academy member Deborah Cabaniss and her associates in their effort to re-design the psychotherapy curriculum for the Psychiatry Residency at Columbia University. They have successfully met a difficult challenge—they have written an accessible, interesting, motivating and useful textbook.
The authors define the scope of the book as confined to psychodynamic psychotherapy, but in fact their book begins with more general chapters on evaluation and the selection of therapeutic goals. The type of psychotherapy for meeting those goals, according to the authors, may or may not include psychodynamic psychotherapy. This evaluation sequence conforms to the “Y model,” a new concept in psychotherapy pedagogy. Developed by Academy member Eric Plakun and his colleagues on the Committee on Psychotherapy by Psychiatrists at the American Psychiatric Association (a committee that included Dr. Cabaniss), the “Y model” describes the elements common to all psycho-therapies and suggests that they be taught first, before the specifics of any particular psychotherapeutic technique. This book, then, might be used as a primer for any course in psychotherapy training, not just one that focuses specifically on psychodynamic psychotherapy.
The book is written in a way that makes use of our current neuroscientific understanding of learning. Cabaniss herself is an interactive teacher. It must have been a particular challenge for her to conceptualize the content in a textbook format that is usually passive. We know that experiential learning is the deepest and most long lasting form of