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This book discusses psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy from a viewpoint at variance with certain essential principles that characterize classical psychoanalysis. There are shortcomings in conceptualization, and valid psychoanalytic process cannot evolve because the technique aims at deliberately avoiding regression. Instead, the therapist uses his influence to persuade the patient to change. Although insight is allegedly used to bring changes about, it is a predetermined insight arrived at by the therapist in the first interview or 'in the next few'. (The familiar approach of the so-called corrective emotional experience is thus signaled.)
In Parts I and II of the book, Approach to Psychodynamically Based Psychotherapy and Practice of Psychodynamically Based Psychotherapy, the outlook and its shortcomings are readily evident. The main point made with regard to goals of treatment is that beyond insight, the mind has to be freed from outmoded childhood patterns. In this task the analyst is advised promptly to evaluate the early life influences in order to judge what the patient must do to mature. Further, the analyst is to 'analyze out' the infantile, he is to discuss with the patient 'certain fundamentals in living', and he is to correct the patient's 'central emotional forces'.
It is natural enough, in view of this approach, that all cases seem relatively easy to understand and explain. Anxiety and psychopathology are alleged to stem mainly from hostility, which in turn is the result of various vicissitudes of dependent love needs ('more or less erotized'). Libidinal development, in this framework, is relegated to a defensive role, one of 'flight by regression'. Hence, the troublemaker is hostility, and the analyst's job is 'to detect, disclose, and resolve it'.
In seeking support for his approach, Saul repeatedly refers to two formulations attributed to Freud. The first is a reference to Civilization and Its Discontents to the effect that all guilt d