Psychoanalytic Technique: Contributions from Ego Psychology (Técnica Psicoanalítica: Aportaciones de la Psicología del Yo): By Cecilio Paniagua. Madrid: Editorial Tébar Flores, 2014. 426 pp.

As many readers know, Cecilio Paniagua has been an important contributor to the resurgence of literature on ego psychology and its focus on the technical modifications advanced by the emergence of Freud's structural model. Along with Fred Busch, Paniagua has been on the forefront of amplifying the work of Paul Gray (1982),† who first called analysts’ attention to a “developmental lag” in psychoanalytic technique between Freud's first and second models of the mind. In his latest work, Paniagua hopes to reach a larger audience of clinicians who, for reasons he describes, have held on to an outdated theory of technique that was scrubbed in principle, though never in action, by Freud (1923).† In Psychoanalytic Technique: Contributions from Ego Psychology, Paniagua invites the reader to consider the advantages and rationality of adopting a technique that is consistent with Freud's revised theory of the mind and that, for the author, is best suited for helping the patient make the most use of the psychoanalytic method.

This excellent book contains too much of value to adequately summarize in one review. But I will try. Paniagua's powers of persuasion are complemented by the abundant and rich clinical material he presents. The process notes are specific to the questions he raises and are brutally honest in their inclusion of missteps along with successes. All examples are immediately illustrative of the technical issue at hand and, although he does not always indicate the time frame, appear to span the range from more recent work to cases seen as far back as his candidacy. Thus, we get a sense of Paniagua's style at different moments in his career through session excerpts that read like unpolished records of complex analytic interactions. The conundrums gotten into by the analytic pair in his examples