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Psychoanalytic Case Studies has two editors who have compiled the material and written the preface to the book and to each of its four segments; one introducer who has striven to provide an overview of the whole enterprise; four analyst-authors who report their own case-work; eight discussants who take up the four case reports, two to each case, samples of six decades of psychoanalytic work. The patients include two men, one woman, and one boy, of whom the three adults would fall in the category of severely ill. Apparently it took at least nine years to get the book together and into print. Its publication occurred in the same year that the Journal in which this review appears came into being—a noncoincidence to which I shall return.
I can only defer to Leo Rangell's “Introduction and Overview” of the contents of this 286-page volume, which supplies both penetration and perspective that this reviewer cannot improve upon, or even meet. I shall, rather, having thus leaned upon Rangell, establish a viewpoint and then offer some comments from that viewpoint on only certain aspects of the book which are particularly relevant to these current issues, as I see them.
As psychoanalysts we have a difficult problem at this juncture in what can best be called public relations. We have to deal with strategies of outreach, marketing, competition in the marketplace, third-party payers, and governmental relations, all of which have traditionally been foreign to psychoanalysts. In this highly competitive mental