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What fine value is offered here, both in production and in content, for less than the price of a decent meal!
Dr Storr makes his purpose quite clear. He proffers an introduction to the practice of individual psychotherapy, aimed primarily at doctors training in psychiatry. He defines psychotherapy as the art of alleviating personal distress through the agency of words and a personal, professional relationship. He continues with some rather airy acknowledgements of his debt to Freud, Jung, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Milner, Rycroft, Laing and Szasz, for me a rather heterogeneous set of bedfellows. He states his beliefs that ‘we shall soon see the disappearance of the analytical schools as discrete entities’. He may be right, but nobody else has told me of this imminent miracle, and the history of the depth psychology movement does not make me take his prediction very seriously.
I also reject his claim that, until recently, psychiatrists employed by the National Health Service were ‘primarily concerned with the care and treatment of the psychotic, and therefore tended to be more au fait with physical methods of treatment than with psychotherapy’. I wonder what I, and hundreds like me, have been up to since 1948, or how often Storr has been to meetings of the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society, or of the psychotherapy section of what is now the Royal College of Psychiatry. He states: ‘Even orthodox Freudians seldom see their patients so frequently’ (i.e., five times a week). Has he enquired of orthodox Freudians—or Jungians? There is only one part of his introduction with which I can agree wholeheartedly, when he says: ‘Many of those who become psychiatrists are temperamentally unsuited to the practice of psychotherapy as a whole-time occupation’. Let me add that it is not from envy that I criticise the short introduction to a book which, on the whole, succeeds admirably in its aim.
Such is the elegance of Storr's writing, and his gift for conveying complex m