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This remarkable book1 fills a great need by its presentation and elucidation of one type of the various psychoanalytically oriented
brief therapies which today are a theoretic, economic, and social necessity. It begins with a short exposition of the difference between psychoanalysis and the psychotherapy in which 'a goal-limited adjustment' is the aim of the treatment, and leads immediately to the verbatim report of an initial interview between the doctor and a patient with a chronic skin disease. Commentaries, following significant statements of both the doctor and the patient, are given in italics. These commentaries are didactically most useful, indicating what is going on in the treatment: 'He escapes into silence. He is brought back into the sector by taking up the feel of "pain"'; another example: '… too much anxiety is seemingly stirred up, therefore [the] interviewer leads him back to recent times'.
The first interview is given as a demonstration of the technique of 'associative anamnesis',2 followed by an extremely important theoretical and technical discussion of the use of this method of interviewing, with cogent remarks about what happens dynamically in such treatment. To indicate the differences, occasional comparisons with therapeutic psychoanalysis are made.
The major portion of the book is devoted to a case of anxiety neurosis. The patient was seen fourteen times in weekly interviews which are recorded verbatim with commentaries. In many ways this is a remarkable document worthy of serious study and full of potentialities for teaching. The second, third and fourth portions of the book are brief, the second consisting of two essays on psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and social work, both having important theoretical and practical implications; the