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In 1976, Leo Stone and Robert Langs sat down together for the first of six audiotaped meetings which Stone understood were to be "quite casual, informal conversations" (p. ix) about their perceptions of the psychoanalytic situation and its experiences. That these meetings turned out to be neither casual nor conversational, but instead had a formidable agenda and a definite intent, he quickly discovered.
Langs was "primed for debate" (p. ix). He showed anticipatory uneasiness over exposing himself to criticism and discomfort about engaging in dispute with a bold and more experienced colleague (p. vii), but he also evinced satisfaction that the basic structure of his theories was well established (p. viii).
What is hinted at in these prefatory remarks receives fuller exposition in the book than one would wish to have. It is reiterated throughout more than three hundred pages of dialogue in a carelessly edited book that is as tedious as it is stimulating and as repetitious and circling as it is informative and fresh. The format of the work is such that the attitudes and styles of the two contestants come through with a consistency and vividness that is rarely found