You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The purpose of this book, as the author describes it, is to
… formulate what emotion theory, interpersonal psychoanalysis, and my own clinical experience have taught me about having a significant emotional impact in treatment …. The fundamental
Page 294tenets of emotion theory … have powerful implications for therapeutic action …. [How does] one person affect how life feels to someone else? [p. ix]
In the first chapter, Sandra Buechler lists assumptions underlying emotion theory, many of which seem plausible. For example, Assumption 1 is that “the emotions constitute the primary motivational system for human beings” (p. 3); Assumption 2 is that “emotions are adaptive” (p. 7). The tenets relate more or less directly to six subsequent chapters, which focus on core emotions such as shame, grief, joy, and anger. A final, “special” section is titled “Training: Nurturing the Capacity to Make a Difference.”
The book is overly long and somewhat meandering in its style of exposition. For someone promoting the centrality of emotions, this author is extraordinarily wordy. If her intended audience is the psychoanalytic community, she often belabors the obvious, treading familiar ground. By the end, her initial questions about therapeutic action are far from fully answered, yet along the way she makes interesting points, some of which are summarized below.
Creating emotional change is an additive process. Assumption 5 in emotion theory holds that
The emotions form a system, with a change in one emotion affecting the experience of all the others …. Emotions are affected by the company they keep …. For example, shame may be bearable if it is not joined by intense anger about feeling the shame, [p. 64]
We can have an effect on any emotion by addressing any other emotion, [p. 57]
She describes emotions as fluid, blendable by their very nature, and therefore amenable to influence in the clinical situation. Therapeutic change comes about by adding emotion, according to Buechler, not by focusing on