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Dr. Storr has written a psychotherapist's credo. This is something that most analysts have impulses to do, and it is interesting that few follow them through. He describes his book as “the attempt of a psychotherapist to define in simple terms the basic hypotheses upon which his practice rests”, and proceeds to do so with a minimum of delay. Starting with a stirring chapter on the value of the individual personality, he goes on to make clear that personality is relative and to underline the importance of relationship for its maturation, and then to define the mature relationship.
In his chapter on “The Emergent Personality” he gives us a balanced and reasoned view on the old and thorny question of “nature versus nurture”, and gently but firmly chides a standard British textbook of psychiatry for its genetically biased approach. An interesting idea in this context is Storr's equation of Jung's introversion and extraversion with the Kleinian schizoid and depressive positions; some clinical data in support of this would have been welcome. He deals adequately with indentification, introjection, projection, and dissociation, although some psycho-analytic eyebrows will be raised at the use he makes of the last term. On heterosexual development he again makes his point that sexual perversion can be understood as the attempt of the patient to transfer masculinity from another man to himself, but he neglects to give credit to Bycowski, who expressed this view in 1945.
He described very well the psychotherapeutic process and the analytic attitude: “I do not believe that it matters to which school the therapist belongs, or which beliefs and theories he holds, if he himself is capable of objective love.” He does not make it clear, however, that there is more to an analysis than the attitude of the analyst. Transference and counter-transference receive due attention, and Storr states “the psychotherapist needs to be free from counter-transference”. This could do with amplification