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This book consists of about a dozen sketchy and grossly inadequate reviews of the biological, psychological, social, and philosophic fields purportedly relevant to psychotherapeutic theory and progress. They are, by and large, presented without the critical and synthesizing insights needed to help the reader avoid the 'uncritical syncretism' the author deplores. The author seems not to have heeded his own injunctions against an eclecticism which consists of '… a disordered conglomeration of disparate devices thrown together into an expedient potpourri'.
The principal injunction seems to be to renounce doctrinaire theory and to rely on an interdisciplinary probing of knowledge and skills, with parity for contributions from all fields. To this end the author parades a superficially impressive array of data which ranges from fundamental biochemistry, genetics, and neurophysiology, to cybernetics, religion, and ecology, to cite a few examples. Pharmacotherapy, role manipulation, deconditioning, and inculcation of new moral values (presumably by exhortation and example) are linked to observations or theorized relationships in these various fields, and are supposed thereby to merit a place in modern psychotherapeutic practice.
The implication is that this rationale for psychotherapy is more appropriate and more flexible than a therapeutic system rooted in an (inevitably) dogmatic theory. Accordingly, the twenty-two page summary of psychoanalytic theory (subdivided into Freudian, Ego-analytic,