Comparing Schools of Analytic Therapy edited by Peter Buirski Northvale, NJ:  Jason Aronson, 1994,  xvi + 256 pp., $35.00

This is a very interesting and unique book. Its particular goal is set forth in the title; whether or not the book achieves that goal is difficult to say. The editor uses a technique that he has used for years as a teacher: a protocol of the first several hours of an analytic case is presented to us to be analyzed according to different “schools” of analytic thought. Because of the difficulty of presenting full-length, verbatim material, including the analyst's own thoughts and interactions, without endangering the privacy of the patient and the confidentiality of the relationship, Buirski has attempted to solve this problem by presenting instead a fictitious character: Alexander Portnoy, the protagonist of Phillip Roth's 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint. Readers of this new book who have not read that novel should do so in order to understand the various analytic interpretations which here are put upon Portnoy's Complaint. In that novel, Alexander Portnoy, lying on his analyst's couch for the first time, sets forth in a somewhat hypomanic fashion all that he thinks he knows about himself and all that he thinks he knows about psychoanalytic ideas in order to place himself in what he believes to be the frame of reference of his analyst, “Dr. Spielvogel.” This