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This is the final volume in Nancy McWilliams's trilogy of psychoanalytic primers for clinicians.1 While both her earlier books have been rightfully heralded for their erudition, user-friendly style, trenchant clinical examples, and wide applicability in an age of competing theoretical dispositions, this new arrival is particularly noteworthy for the clinical wisdom and uncommon courage it brings to tackling an array of problems that psychodynamic practitioners face every day, but rarely speak about openly.
The author is a master clinician and sought-after teacher who displays an abiding, deep love for the discipline of psychoanalysis and the values and unique perspective it brings to patient care. Without deriding other points of view or forms of therapy, her clarion call for a treatment process that “feels to both parties like a conversation from the heart, not the head” (p. 66), and simultaneously promotes “personal growth … or a depth of understanding about universal issues” (p. 17), rings throughout every chapter, and hints at why many young clinicians who have completed a psychiatric residency or graduate school are turning to institutes or postgraduate psychodynamic therapy programs for additional education. Aiming to touch and to assist those clinicians who are new to the field, and who want and need to know the nuts and bolts of what McWilliams calls the “psychodynamic sensibility” and how to put its principles of treatment into action, she is sure to find a captive audience.
I became aware of the pedagogic potency of this book months before I was asked to review it. Because McWilliams's earlier works are now considered standard references in psychiatric residencies that continue to include psychodynamic theory and opportunities to practice the craft within the core curriculum, it should have