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This is an engaging, useful, and easily read text that modern psychoanalysts will find generally congruent with their practice.
Wishnie begins his book with mercifully brief synopses of authors whose views are consistent with his. Among the array of frequently referenced clinicians are Kohut, Searles, Kernberg, Bollas, Epstein, Hoffman, Buie, Ogden, Winnicott, and Little. A medically trained psychoanalyst, he acknowledges the influence of major theoretical schools and infant research.
The power of Wishnie's work is in the detailed clinical cases he has selected from a practice in which he seems to have been “the therapist of last resort.” His experience with drug addicts, criminals, and patients with impulse disorders is reflected in his down-to-earth and personally engaging style. The reader is led in an emotional manner through Wishnie's struggles with clinically recalcitrant and emotionally tumultuous patients. His forte is exploring with the patient the here and now without overstimulating the patient. His descriptions of his and his patients’ feelings are presented in everyday, jargonless terms. He tries to stay close to his patients’ experience for he believes that patients attempt to induce emotional reactions in him. Wishnie's concept of the patient's role in emotional communication is similar to Spotnitz's, and like Spotnitz, he is a master at theorizing about the patient after examining and “metabolizing” projections and countertransference reactions. He feels countertransferences are pervasive and inevitable in that