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The title of this book might cause the reader to expect a technical treatise dealing with concepts about the treatment interaction and psychic processes leading to internal changes. The author's wish to focus on the limits of interpretation implicitly promises that he will introduce us to other therapeutic strategies, enabling us to deal with a group of patients which have been considered difficult to analyze. In discussing the limits of interpretation, we might
also hope to learn more about interpretations, per se, that is, how verbal interchanges and insight can lead to the resolution of intrapsychic conflict and the acquisition of psychic structure.
Lomas does not address the issue of the impact or types of interpretation to any great extent. I would have anticipated that he might have become engaged with dogmas and dictums about interpretation that have seldom been questioned. For example, he might have examined what in some circles has been considered the sine qua non of psychoanalytic treatment, the transference interpretation. If this is the only type of interpretation that is psychoanalytically effective, why is this so, and in terms of psychic processes and structures, how does this work?
I am not, however, calling into question what the author does or does not choose to discuss. He is not at all reluctant to challenge dictums and although this is not a book that explores interpretations, it deals with broader issues involving general rather than specific aspects of the therapeutic process. He emphasizes that interpretations go beyond intellectual content; they are not a disembodied stream of words as I once wrote . There are many implicit communications which are related to the construction of a holding environment rather than to the acquisition of insight.
He stresses the importance of the therapist's attitudes because analysts are in a unique position in that their orientations as persons may conflict with an optimal analytic stance, whatever that might be