The authors are professors at the University of Ulm working in the department of psychotherapy. The original German edition, called Lehrbuch der Psychoanalytischen Therapie, Bd. I Grundlagen, 1986, has, strangely enough, not been translated as ‘Textbook of Psychoanalytic Therapy’ because that is what the whole two-volume work in its unique comprehensiveness amounts to. About a thousand references in this volume alone, with German and English titles in roughly equal parts and just a sprinkling of French, together with a careful name-and-subject index, are evidence