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Robert Wallerstein has been a major voice in psychoanalysis for the last thirty years. His work as the principal investigator of the thirty-five year long Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation, the results of which were published in 1986, is well known. In addition, he has written extensively about research and technique and about practically every theoretical development in psychoanalysis. His approach is consistently balanced and fair, and indicative of a wide range of experience and a significant depth of understanding.
The subtitle of The Talking Cures, “The Psychoanalyses and the Psychotherapies,” reveals the principal goal of the book, which is to study the emergence of these multiple and diverse developments from what appeared at one time to be a consensus of uniformity, i.e., from a univocally intelligible psychoanalysis. As Wallerstein observes, however, such a uniform understanding was always only putative at best. In the early years, dissidents were simply expelled to preserve the purity of psychoanalysis and their views were deemed alien to its nature and purposes, only to be reintegrated over the decades following. The conflict between the Kleinians and the Anna Freudians in Britain culminated not in expulsions but in accommodation and in the practical acceptance of some theoretical diversity.