You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book consists of papers collected together as a Festschrift for Robert Wallerstein, one of America's most distinguished psychoanalysts, sometime director of the Menninger Clinic and past president of the Psychoanalytical Association. It celebrates ‘his extraordinary integrationist spirit’ by drawing together contributions from various quarters of the psychoanalytic community.
The papers are somewhat loosely aggregated around the apparently problematic findings of the Menninger Psychotherapy Research Project published in 1986 by Wallerstein as Forty-two Lives in Treatment. These findings are that ‘structural change’ may occur in supportive psychotherapy; that some psychoanalyses make use of supportive techniques: that indeed many patients with such analyses had achieved considerable change and furthermore that some of these patients had achieved such change without significant prior changes in conscious insight (pp. xi-xii).
The implicit crisis in this is that the sharp distinction which has been traditionally made, particularly in American psychoanalytic circles, between psychoanalysis and supportive psychotherapy can no longer be sustained as it had been according to Kris (p. 96) when in the early years of psychoanalysis there had been fear of confusing psychoanalytic techniques with those of suggestion, and later with role play and manipulation. There is also the fear that if conscious insight is not the agent of change with accompanying increase in consciousness, then the agent of change cannot be identified and that then there is little to distinguish the skilled practitioner from the charlatan.
Earlier in the introduction, structure is glancingly defined in the following awkward sentence: ‘The systems for enduring and slowly changing meanings are what is meant by the general term structure in the title of this book’ (p. xi). One senses some disquiet, especially in Weinshel's and in Rangell's contributions about this departure from the more traditional idea of