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In recent years, American psychoanalysts have been involved in a major reconceptualization of the psychoanalytic process. To reiterate the words of Warren Poland, who has contributed a brief but eloquent Foreword to this excellent book, an increasing awareness of the interactive, dyadic dimensions of psychoanalysis has brought us to the point of now being able to consider the analytic process as "a vital interchange between … two participants" (p. xii), in which "the examination of the patient's mind is realized within a matrix of a deeply buried pair of reciprocal self-inquiries" (p. xiii). The papers contained in Theodore Jacobs's new book, The Use of the Self, represent an important contribution to this reconceptualization. It should be of immediate interest and value to every psychoanalytic student, clinician, and clinical theorist.
In Jacobs's experience, the diagnosis and rectification of certain insidious, but significant analytic difficulties require us to carry our investigations beyond "the words exchanged between patient and analyst" (p. xxi) to the hidden messages that underlie these words. These messages, which are frequent, unrecognized accompaniments to the more manifest analytic discourse, can reflect subtle judgments or covert communications of performative intent on the part of either participant in the analytic relationship. Rather than appear in the content of speech, these messages may instead be "transmitted through tone and syntax, vocal quality and inflection, posture and movement" (p. xxi). If these nonverbal channels of experience are not carefully and consistently monitored by the analyst, the impact of the messages that they convey may go unrecognized, and various forms of therapeutic stalemate may ensue. When they are attended to, they can furnish the analyst with a powerful source of data about the analytic relationship, which can be used to inform the analyst's interventions and to free up his/her analyzing instrument from the en