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This is a very valuable book. To date there has been no systematic discussion in our literature of the technical problems of the opening phase of “standard” psychoanalytic treatment. Furthermore, although there are a growing number of papers on the conversion of
psychotherapy to psychoanalytic treatment, to date we have had no comprehensive exposition of the special problems entailed. Who are the patients who would benefit from modifications of our usual requirements so that they can be helped later to enter full psychoanalytic treatment, and what modifications do they require? What type of modifications can be successfully utilized? The editors are to be congratulated for assembling an outstanding group of psychoanalysts and inviting them to discuss these problems. Jacobs lays out the strategy of the book in his editor's introduction. Advances in recent years have made it possible to refine our method of beginning an analysis and to attune it to the requirements of the individual case. “Although each of these situations requires careful handling in the opening phase, little has been written about the theoretical and technical issues involved in the management of this critical period of treatment. It is for this reason that separate chapters in this book have been devoted to an overview of the difficulties and opportunities involved in beginning an analysis with these groups of patients.”
The book is organized into three sections: “Theoretic Considerations,” “On Beginning Without Modification,” and “On Beginning With Modifications.” Naturally, the chapters actually overlap the boundaries of those divisions somewhat, and as is almost always the case in a volume with more than a dozen authors, there is some variation in the quality of these contributions. For the most part they are unusually good.
The opening chapter by Henry Bachrach is a masterful survey of the literature on analyzability and is a logical introduction to this volume. Bachra