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.
This slim volume is best appreciated as two treatises, addressed to different audiences for different purposes, woven together into a single book. One treatise is a primer on the use of psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, suitable for a beginning psychotherapy trainee who has had little or no exposure to these ideas. The other is a challenge to the psychoanalytic tradition, addressed to practicing analysts and psychodynamic theoreticians. Here the author argues that a set of techniques aimed at producing behavioral change, including explicit instructions to the patient about how to conduct his life, not only are compatible with an analytic stance, but also can serve to enrich the process and outcome of psychoanalysis.
In its function as a primer for the psychodynamic novice, the book is quite successful, and analysts should applaud the effort to spread these ideas to a new audience. The language is clear and jargon-free, and the chapters are well organized and supplemented with tables summarizing the main points. The Preface offers a clear statement of the variety of ways in which psychodynamic concepts can enhance the work of the non-analytic psychotherapist. The range of psychoanalytic ideas introduced is impressive: transference and counter-transference, conflict, defense, trauma, psychogenetics, mentalization, resistance, interpretation, reaction formation, the unconscious, fantasy, and repression, along with many others.
The text is generously supplemented with case examples of therapist-patient exchanges, drawn from work with twenty-eight different patients. The dialogues reported are unrealistically simple; most consist of a few comments back and forth, followed by the patient saying something like “I never thought of it that way,” then a direction by the
therapist to act in a particular fashion, leading to a report in the next session of a successful outcome. This format is perhaps useful for the education of a novice therapist, but the more experienced