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Winer's book displays the efforts of a senior clinician, teacher, and critic to integrate several contemporary ways of understanding the analytic relationship. He draws on ideas from interpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations, family therapy, narrative and historical truth, countertransference, intimacy, and the analyst's personal life. This volume is full of rich clinical vignettes and theoretical scholarship. Winer puts his clinical work on the line and offers us an inside look at how he thinks and feels about his patients. His chapter titles reveal the breadth of material he tackles: “Expanding One-Person Theory, “The Relational Dimension,” “Therapy as Marriage,” “Therapy as Narratives,” “…as Storytelling,” “…as Mourning,” “Beginnings and Endings,” “Desire,” “Politics,” “Supervision,” “Psychotherapy and the Midlife Crisis.
He emphasizes the importance of understanding the analytic dyad from the two person model, that is, the therapist is a major participant in the therapy. Unfortunately, Winer omits 40 years of writing by the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis; he arrives at a two-person theory by way of Loewald and Gill and pays only a passing reference to Sullivan and Mitchell. Readers familiar with the participant/observer model will find Winer very familiar. His task could have been made easier had he cited these early interpersonal ideas. Winer is clearly wrestling with certain demons and writes as if analysis has not recovered from Freud's initial dismissal of the family as: “potentially dangerous, corrupting, undermining…. [Before World War I, Freud] chose to take on only independent unmarried individuals as patients” (p. 49). Winer argues forcefully, at times stridently, for the centrality of family object relations theory as a way of understanding psychoanalytic interaction. Attachment themes are ubiquitous: