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In his introduction to this extremely worthwhile and surprisingly comprehensive textbook on psychodynamic psychiatry, Glen Gabbard comments on his reasons for writing the book. He tells of speaking to residents, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals around the country who repeatedly expressed concern about their inadequate training in psychodynamic psychiatry. He also relates his own disquiet regarding the "unnecessary polarization between biological and psychodynamic approaches within psychiatry" (p. xiv). This book is Gabbard's extremely ambitious effort to answer the needs of psychiatric residents and clinical psychiatrists for an up-to-date, relatively comprehensive textbook that correlates dynamic understanding and therapies, including individual psychotherapy, group psychotherapy, family/marital therapy, dynamic pharmacotherapy, and dynamically informed hospital treatment, with the major DSM-III-R diagnoses, thus meeting a need which many professionals experience when confronted with the essentially descriptive nature of DSM-III-R.
This task is a tall order, particularly when one considers that Gabbard's goal is to produce a one-volume text "that does not require a forklift to transport it" (p. xiv). Fundamentally, Gabbard achieves his goal—indeed surpasses it—in that this volume not only adds a psychodynamic perspective to DSM-III-R, but also, in the six chapters of Section I, discusses basic principles, theoretical bases,