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This is a book of contrasts, paradoxes, beauty, and oversimplification. It is written by a practicing psychotherapist who also teaches and supervises psychiatric residents, and whose background reflects a remarkably broad education including community service, housing development, and working with high school students and in third world nations. He also has published scholarly clinical work particularly on the treatment of borderline disorders. The references for this book are also highly idiosyncratic, ranging from Aristotle's Rhetoric to writings from philosophy, the Bible, sociology, and psychoanalysis. In my opinion, the title does not really reflect the broad sweep of the book, which seems to be not only a highly personal view of human nature by a gifted therapist with rich experience but also an account of an approach to psychotherapy. My experience of reading such books is positive. Psychotherapy is not only a science but, I think, perhaps even more an art and a craft. The more that gifted therapists write, the more “tricks of the trade” can be made available to students and practitioners of psychotherapy.
My only criticism of the book from a technical point of view is that it seems at times oversimplified and sometimes trite in its use of language, as if these essays were derived from speeches to lay audiences. Reminiscent of Carl Rogers, Lewin seems to imply that merely being with a patient and listening and being empathic is sufficient. In some respects the description of the therapeutic relationships are also oversimplified. For example, the idea that a therapist who cries during a session as a form of empathic sharing with the patient's extreme misery (pp. 66, 67) is in my opinion hardly ever advisable. I have had more than one patient who had seem therapists who shared tears of empathy/sympathy, and who found it confusing and frightening.