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Addressed primarily to psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists, this book distills the author's integrated experience of three decades into a remarkably compact and competent presentation. The process of psychotherapeutic collaboration between doctor and patient is well described, with the accent placed as much on the emotional difficulties of the therapist as on those of his patient in the complexities of this interaction. More than a work on technique, it is a significant perspective on the evolution of current therapeutic attitudes and technical modifications from the predominantly investigative phase of psychoanalysis thirty years ago.
This book should be in demand chiefly for its relevance to the treatment of schizoid or borderline patients, who constitute nowadays almost a third of the patients who consult psychiatrists. In 1919 Freud stated: 'We cannot avoid also taking for treatment patients who are so helpless and incapable of ordinary life that for them one has to combine analytic with educative influence'; and he made the prediction: 'Developments in our therapy will surely proceed in a different direction; … above all, in that … characterized as "activity" on the part of the analyst'.1 Dr. Fromm-Reichmann's experience at the Chestnut Lodge Sanitarium is, in a large measure, the fulfilment of that prediction, and her accomplishments with the type of patients described have done much to modify earlier therapeutic pessimism in regard to the psychoanalytic treatment of psychoses.