This short book is a paean to the intersubjective school of psychoanalysis. The author, an analyst from Berlin, intends to describe “the nature of therapeutic action through a radicalized version of intersubjective systems theory” (front matter of the book) and draws heavily on Kohut, Stolorow, Atwood, Orange, and the Boston Change Process Study Groups to make his case.

Jaenicke's thesis is that the two participants in analysis co-create an intersubjective field or system, and that “it is the system that is or isn't healed, rather than what one monadic expert does or cannot do for a monadic patient” (p. 7). Failure and suffering, he notes reasonably, are basic parts of human subjectivity and therefore reside in analyst and patient alike. Jaenicke believes that analysis is a bi-directional encounter where the strengths and weaknesses of both analyst and patient “become entangled and are subsequently dealt with in the working-through process”