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As far as I am aware, there is no other book like this out there. No one else has so thoroughly described the psychological treatment of psychotic patients when concepts of self psychology are utilized to apprehend the therapist's work and its efficacy. Of particular merit is the authors'
extensive description of clinical process, which vividly depicts how they struggled with the challenges they encountered in their work with these patients and how remarkably effective they were. The authors' extensive clinical illustrations—often including verbatim dialogue—merit close attention.
The book is organized into three parts, corresponding to each of Heinz Kohut's selfobject transferences: Mirroring, Idealization, and Alikeness (Kohut's designations for the latter are “Twinship” and “Alterego”). Several chapters in each part abundantly describe clinical work with psychotic patients, where attention to these selfobject transferences appears to yield beneficial results. The authors emphasize the value of attending to what Kohut referred to as the leading edge of these transferences—what has been elaborated as forward edge transferences.1 Chapter 4, in part I, also illustrates the clinical relevance of Kohut's concept of the vertical split in working with these patients.
The authors' stated intent is that their book address not only the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, but also the development of the self during intensive psychotherapy of the psychoses. This is, in fact, their emphasis throughout. Their understanding is that self psychologically oriented analysis is effective with psychotic patients in essentially the same way that it is effective with any other patient—by strengthening the self through “facilitating self-esteem via effective engagement with the forward edge” (p. 11), that is, with sustained “HOPE” in hand (p. 12).
Kohut described a two-step process that he believed leads to analytic cure: prolonged empathic immersion in the patient's subjective experience, f