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Psychotherapy: The Analytic Approach is a collection of 20 well-written papers by a distinguished group of experienced, classically trained psychoanalysts. Similarity of orientation notwithstanding, the views expressed in these chapters are neither uniform nor formulaic, and the topics covered are impressively wide ranging.
Aronson writes in his opening chapter on “Principles of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” that the “primary or overriding principle [of psychoanalytic therapy] is emotionally meaningful insight growing out of interpretation of unconscious intrapsychic conflict” (p. 2). This statement will be accepted by most psychoanalysts as distinctive of what is fundamental to psychoanalysis. Not every psychoanalyst or analytic therapist, however, will accept this statement as adequately addressing the question of “one psychoanalysis or several?” asked by Jacob Arlow in the book's foreword (p. xv).
No one should be dissuaded from reading on, though, since the book's premise does not rest on polemic, and readers will be rewarded for persistence by the authors' lucid and forthright efforts to take on the difficult question of whether or not a fundamental distinction is to be made between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically derived psychotherapy. Scharfman and Aronson set the scene for a lively discussion. Scharfman, in a chapter on “The Therapeutic Relationship and the Role of Transference,” states that “it is an error [to] try to apply some of…psychoanalysis to psychotherapy, since the basic structures of the techniques are different” (p. 64), and Aronson states that “the method of approach is fundamentally different [between psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis]” (p. 8).
Aronson adds, however, that psychotherapy may approach psychoanalysis and that analytic goals may be achieved only rarely in