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This volume is said by the author to be the 'outgrowth of lectures delivered to residents in psychiatry' and to fill a need for the 'missing instruction in methodology' which has been the source of the 'therapist's self-doubt and lack of self-confidence'.
The material is presented in outline form with numbered and subnumbered headings. It is divided into Historical Background, Psychoanalytic Theory (which the author calls 'Psychosystematics'), Methodology, and Differential Dynamics. This is a great deal of material to present in so small a volume and almost no clinical data are presented. Much is so condensed that it becomes very complex and must be carefully thought through by the reader. It is difficult for an analyst to follow the author's thoughts in many places, and one wonders whether some portions could be understood by the residents and young psychiatrists to whom it is addressed. There is a great deal of repetition in the volume. For example, almost all of pages thirty-nine and ninety-two are the same, word for word. Repetition is a good teaching technique and binds the lectures together, but carried over into a book, it can become rather tedious.
Dr. Agoston has done a great deal of research for this volume and obviously has put much thought and hard work into it; yet this reviewer wonders whether it really fulfils the role he hoped for—to supply a methodology for 'insight therapy'. Except for a brief excursion into cybernetics, the psychology presented is standard dynamic psychology; except for a few words coined by the author, the wording and definitions are those generally considered psychoanalytic, and except for the briefest consideration of the use of drugs in conjunction with psychotherapy, the methodology describes the technique and process of psychoanalysis. What is the therapy the author is trying to teach to residents and young psychiatrists? Although in this work it is applied to neurotics, character disorders, and psychotics with only