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.
For many years, psychotherapy research was plagued by the criticism that each individual therapist's technique was highly subjective and idiosyncratic. Therefore, the critics argued, group designs, such as those used in pharmacotherapy research, lacked scientific rigor and were incapable of demonstrating the efficacy of psychotherapy. As a response to these concerns, the field of psychotherapy research has evolved in the direction of the development of sophisticated treatment manuals, which systematically describe the appropriate technical procedures in a variety of therapeutic situations. Though these manuals may have the disadvantage of describing psychotherapeutic technique as a somewhat rigid enterprise, they have the advantage of assuring that treatments delivered by different practitioners are reasonably consistent in their approach.
It is in this context that five senior clinicians from the psychotherapy research program at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, Westchester Division, have created the first handbook that systematically describes the psychodynamic therapy of the borderline patient. The authors' most remarkable accomplishment is that they have managed to write a book that is as useful to the clinician as it is to the psychotherapy researcher. They are fully aware of the pitfalls of reductionism inherent in any psychotherapy handbook, but they have succeeded admirably in outlining a dynamic strategy in the psychotherapy of borderline patients, in cataloging the most common complications, and in illustrating appropriate interventions to deal with these complications. The prose style is a model of clarity, and the discussions of technical and theoretical issues are mercifully free of metapsychological abstractions.