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 book was written by two clinical psychologists from Michigan, Frank Auld and Marvin Hyman, who were not satisfied with the textbooks available for teaching psychoanalytic therapy to beginning graduate students in clinical psychology. The paucity of psychoanalytic manuals of technique is remarkable, given that psychoanalysis as a theory and therapeutic method is about to enter its second century. There is, of course, a vast literature concerned with the technique of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but, as the authors point out, the most noteworthy textbooks or “manuals' are either too sophisticated for beginning therapists (those of Fenichel and Greenson); too limited in scope (Malan, Menninger); or too idiosyncratic regarding psychotherapeutic principles (Basch).
Some critics maintain that the fact that a good psychoanalytic “how-to book” is hard to find simply indicates the therapy's questionable validity. They conclude that psychoanalysis is a nonvalidatable theory that has spawned a therapeutic technique that is art at best, charlatanism or mysticism at worst. Frederick Crews, notorious for his animus against Freud, has taken this position, as has John Kerr, a serious Freud scholar whose writings, though less shrill and polemical than those of Crews, nevertheless advance a similar conclusion. In A Most Dangerous Method: Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein, Kerr (1993) returns again and again to the point that