The implicit bold premise of the title of this book is elaborated into a provocative and, in my mind, quite valid thesis. The authors argue that the analyst and the patient form a contained system whose psychodynamic balances define both the operational and epistemological conditions of the psychoanalytic situation. Within this situation the analyst must be as reflectively aware of his reactions as he is of his interventions, in the same sense that patients are asked to be reflectively aware and introspectively curious about their verbal and nonverbal associations during the hour. In this view countertransference transcends its usual sense of a neurotic transference resistance on the part of the analyst to the patient, to become a darker shadow of empathy in the service of the work of the analysis proper (pp. 61-71).

Invoking the spirit of Wittgenstein, the authors develop their arguments from a proper English positivist commitment to visit