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.
It would please me no end to give this work an unqualified endorsement—I would like to say it is a very good book, except that there is a good deal about it that is not so good. Consequently, I will have to divide my review into the familiar good news—bad news format. First the good news.
The good news is that this is an articulate and well-delineated study of some aspects of psychoanalytic interaction emphasizing the interconnectedness of conceptual and emotional understanding in the analytic process. The text is quite readable and presents its argument and positions with clarity and conviction. Orange brings a weighty load of qualification to her task. She holds two doctorates, one in philosophy from Fordham University and a second in clinical psychology from Yeshiva University. From what I can gather, she has undergone psychoanalytic training, presumably at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, where she is now a member of the faculty. She also supervises in the Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology and has a private practice as well. The book is a strongly argued brief for the intersubjectivity viewpoint advanced by Stolorow and his associates and deriving in large measure from the self psychology school developed under the inspiration of Heinz Kohut. Advocates of this perspective will find much to praise in these pages, which offer a sweeping synthesis of the intersubjective approach that seems to make it the dominant and only surviving hope for the future of psychoanalysis.
Obviously, one's assessment of the good news will depend heavily on one's acceptance of and enthusiasm for the intersubjective approach, especially as developed by Stolorow and company over the last several years. If one does not ride that bandwagon, there is much left to criticize.