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It is a pleasant surprise to find a “landmark” book by a highly respected psychoanalyst, one who has received an American Psychoanalytic Association Outstanding Contribution award for his contributions on technique; a book that contains ideas familiar to modern psychoanalysis: “analysts [should] facilitate verbal expressions of increasingly specific undisplaced derivatives of aggression” or “analyze resistances rather than overcome them.” While there is no mention of Spotnitz directly, either in the text or reference list, there appears to be a clear relationship to ideas that emanate from his work. As Spotnitz (1985) has communicated, what is of utmost importance is that the ideas have found their way into the main body of psychoanalysis. The book by Paul Gray, who died in 2002, contains many interesting and valuable ideas and is well worth reading, especially for students of modern analysis. Gray's work will provide a contrast between modern analysis and more traditional ego-psychoanalytic approaches to treatment. It reinforces how important it is for the analyst to focus on the patient's mind, rather than the patient's life outside the room. Many chapters have been previously published, but a few are published here for the first time.
Gray attributes his ideas about technique to the discrepancy between analytic techniques in theory, which emphasizes the importance of following the patient's mind, and those discussed in clinical conferences, case presentations, and supervision, where interest is often shown in the patient's behavior outside the analytic situation (p. 223). He says, “I've