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With the enormous current interest in the exploration of the therapist's experience while conducting therapy or analysis, this volume makes some interesting contributions, both in theoretically defining certain elements of the therapist's reactions to his patient and in giving many examples of clinical encounters. The author defines different manifestations of the analyst's experience of the patient that distract him from the therapeutic process: counterresistance, symptoms of counterresistance, countertransference resistance, characterological counterresistance, cultural counterresistance, and objective counterresistance.
It is a difficult and confusing task to dissect different aspects of the therapist's potential interference with the therapeutic process. I admire the author's attempt to make these distinctions but found myself puzzled about how these defined entities related to the clinical examples. Despite my reservations, what makes this volume most interesting is the author's courage in presenting detailed clinical material to illustrate different manifestations of the therapist's thoughts and reactions, best illustrated in chapter 12, “The Uses of Objective Counterresistance.” Here he modifies some of his earlier statements about categorizing and being aware of different aspects of counterresistance: “Probably one of the most difficult things for therapists to master is this ability to analyze themselves and to distinguish between subjective and objective countertransference and counterresistance” (p. 256). The author believes, as many psychoanalytic readers do, that he can, through an introspective study of his own behavior, differentiate and understand his own countertransference and counterresistance and his thoughts and behavior directed toward the patient. But he adds a reasonable disclaimer in his next statement: “I still have not mastered it, and perhaps I never will. One of the keys to doing it is to