Personality Styles and Brief Psychotherapy: By Mardi Horowitz, Charles Marmar, Janice Krupnick, Nancy Wilner, Nancy Kaltreider, and Robert Wallerstein. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984. 349 pp.

In recent years, there has been a burgeoning interest in the brief dynamic psychotherapies. This is reflected in the very large number of books and articles which have been published on the topic recently. One must, of necessity, pick and choose carefully among these works. This book is one which all who are seriously interested in brief dynamic psychotherapy will want to read.

Horowitz, a psychoanalyst who has focused on psychotherapy research, and five colleagues describe research in brief psychotherapy conducted at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Insitute of the University of California. The research and the psychotherapy method that evolved from it are unique in several respects. The authors' evaluation of a potential brief psychotherapy patient involves not only a case study approach but also an attempt to classify individuals, utilizing generally accepted psychoanalytic diagnoses, in terms of personality configuration. Their case formulation and treatment employs configurational analysis, which is a process based on both psychoanalytic and cognitive (specifically information processing) theory.

The use of personality diagnosis, with its consequent understanding of the patient's ego functioning, including typical defensive modes, is exceptional among brief therapists. Most practitioners of brief therapy tend merely to generalize and classify patients as either neurotic or more disturbed, and they focus on the dynamics of the specific patient without availing themselves of the wealth of psychoanalytic understanding of different kinds of personality makeup.

There is a further marked difference between this research and treatment methodology and others. Unlike the others, it includes