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This book is a primer intended for the beginning therapist, and it seeks to cover all the important concepts involved in the conduct of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It has a historical perspective and so refers, though very briefly, to many of the major developments in psychoanalytic theory since Freud. These include the work of Sullivan, Erikson, Fromm, Horney, Kohut, Hartmann, Spitz and Greenson. The intension was to produce a book which is understandable without over-simplifying a complex subject, and for the most part the writers succeed in this objective, despite occasional outbursts like, ‘the aggressivised transference … is often accompanied by impaired judgment, marginally impaired reality testing, fluid self boundaries and primitivised super-ego derivatives’ (all terms undefined, p. 47). A good deal of jargon is used, but on the whole it is defined adequately for the reasonably attentive reader. On the other hand, there is some looseness in the usage of the term ‘interpretation’ which variously covers clarification, linking, confrontation and actual interpretation at different times.
The aim of the book is to describe psychoanalytic psychotherapy in theory and in practice, and in its ‘many variations’. In fact, the book concentrates almost exclusively on a particular kind of one-to-one therapy (though one marital case is cited) which is defined as being directed towards symptom alleviation through the necessarily limited changes in