The Theory and Practice of Mental Health Consultation: By Gerald Caplan. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970. 397 pp.

Gerald Caplan has done it again. This tenacious innovator of community mental health services has now evolved a psychoanalytically based theory and practice of mental health consultation. In keeping with an increasing tendency of modern psychoanalysts to help community agencies, Caplan describes work in which the analytically trained consultant assists school teachers, nurses, and agency directors. All the psychoanalytic skills used when guiding parents in dealing with a family are brought to bear in guiding consultants to deal with their clients. Of special interest to psychoanalysts is the relationship between transference phenomena and consultant-consultee phenomena.

Caplan considers a mental health consultant task which until recently has been almost completely alien to most psychoanalysts: participation in the field of social forces. He suggests the consultant may have a role in the mediation between political action groups and mental health agencies. The consultant may also play a creative role by encouraging and even facilitating the expressions of persons whose beliefs require the destruction of existing social orders. While not taking a position as to whether such an alternative