The Process of Psychotherapy. Empirical Foundations and Systems of Analysis: By Donald J. Kiesler, Ph.D. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1973. 464 pp.

Systematic research into the process of psychotherapy (and psychoanalysis) is notoriously difficult. This book is a cemetery for the remains of the systems of process analysis which have died in the struggle. They include one developed along allegedly psychoanalytic lines by the reviewer in collaboration with Timothy Leary, who later

went on to achieve fame in other directions. Seventeen major and eight minor direct systems (i.e., applied to the audio-recorded verbal exchange between patient and therapist), and a host of indirect measures as well lie buried here.

My metaphor is designed to underscore the fact that each system is the idiosyncratic child of its creator with whom he does a study or two. Usually no one else picks up the system to replicate it or develop it further, and it is soon abandoned by its progenitor as well. With the possible exception of the 'experiencing' scale, a patient measure of self-exploration developed in the client-centered school, this likely means that no one has yet found a scheme that taps something essential in the therapeutic process. Kiesler is aware of this, and he has decided that to tackle why it is so is not what this book should be about. I believe the main reason the systems have failed is that the work has been done principally by researchers relatively unsophisticated in therapy, and that the search has been for what is measurable rather than what is crucial. 'Objective' measures of manifest data can never be more than indices which have to be interpreted through clinical grasp. Only a system which relates manifest measures to clinical variables will succeed. Kiesler's presentation of the now familiar 'communication' model testifies to the inadequacy to the clinical situation of an abstract scheme not specifically related to its particular characteristics.

Kiesler does his necrology well and conscientiously. The comparability of the systems is enhanced by describing each in the same set of topics—rationale, da