Psychoanalysis and Behavior Therapy. Toward an Integration: By Paul L. Wachtel. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977. 315 pp.

This book explains the workings and the basis of behavior therapy lucidly and with scholarly dedication. In addition, it explores the possibility of integrating behavior therapy with a form of dynamic psychotherapy which the author delineates in historical perspective vis-à-vis the theories and practices of Freud and his followers. While representing himself as a psychoanalyst and indeed as a spokesman for psychoanalysis, Wachtel loses no time in establishing his position. He notes that "the heirs of Freud are many" and that "not all of those whose thinking has been nourished by Freud have swallowed him whole." He then goes on to criticize "classical" analysis and its practitioners, Freudians who, in Wachtel's view, continue to err right up to the present time. J. Arlow and C. Brenner, for instance, like most of their predecessors, doggedly persist in seeing the source of the patient's suffering in the repressed conflicts of childhood. R. Greenson and L. Stone join the list of the benighted: they "eschew a wide range of therapeutic interventions." Among the best known figures in the history of psychoanalysis, F. Alexander and E. Erikson are among the few exempted from criticism. Wachtel's stated aim is "not simply to purge our thinking of earlier ways of viewing things." That is, he says, only one of the major obstacles