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.
Reviewing a landmark work and a nascent classic is a vexing task. Lists of excellences are apt to be tedious, and praise is always suspect. But with its lucid emphasis on research strategies and its compelling results, this book looms as a keeper. You have been warned.
This collection of papers began as proceedings of the invitational “Eighth Workshop on Empirical Research in Psychoanalysis” held in July 1985, but a number of participants have expanded and revised their contributions. The editors' superb organizational skills make study not only eminently feasible, but a delight. The excitement of the topics is its own allure, and the contributors write with a liveliness that reflects their unambivalent enthusiasm for the briarpatch that is their turf. The two sections, “Towards the Objective Analysis of Psychodynamic Structures” and “The Evolution of Single Case Study Methods” also classify the contributors into Americans and West Germans.
Part I is a fine set of communiqués from the principle sites and figures in psychoanalytic process research in the United States. In order of their appearance, this pantheon includes Strupp in Nashville, Bucci and Dahl in New York, Gill and Hoffman in Chicago, Luborsky and his colleagues in Philadelphia, Silberschatz and the group from San Francisco, Koenigsberg, Kernberg and their colleagues in White Plains, and Virginia Teller from New York, all are at the top of their form. If some readers, like me, miss other investigators with long-standing achievements to their credit, it is fair to recall that this is the account of a historic meeting and is not advanced as exhaustive.
The verbatim transcript of a tape-recorded psychoanalysis in Chapter 2 illustrates the kind of scrupulous cataloguing and unit construction that is essential before work can start, a