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I confess it was daunting to receive a review copy of a book nearly 600 pages long (including 30 pages of references), and set in tiny type. The Talking Cures, however, is not merely monolithic. It is
an attempt to provide the larger psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic community with what we remain hungry for: a semblance of order amidst chaos.
Robert Wallerstein, who needs no introduction to a psychoanalytic audience, has long been an investigator and intellectual pulse-taker of psychoanalytic domains. His monograph Forty-Two Lives in Treatment (Wallerstein, 1986) reported on the Psychotherapy Research Project of The Menninger Foundation, which followed its cohort over 30 years and stands as the most comprehensive outcome study of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to date. The current work elaborates on the questions that generated and were generated by the project. A concise phrasing of the most salient (and clinically relevant) among them might be, What treatment for whom, when? To begin to answer this question, one needs to make some sense of the contemporary psychoanalytic landscape—Where are we?—and, process being no less important to the development of a discipline than to an individual treatment, How did we get here?
In essence, Wallerstein offers an exhaustive (if at times exhausting) account of the birth of psychotherapy from the crucible of psychoanalysis, and the subsequent, substantial growing pains primarily of the latter. His is a historic reconstruction and critique of all the major arguments, both theoretical and technical, that have clarified, elaborated, and plagued the talking cure since Freud's time. Major authors, too numerous to name, are quoted to an extent that the text often reads like primary source material. Yet diverse voices, which otherwise might not wittingly have addressed each other, are assimilated into an expansive tapestry—an accomplishment indeed.
In the beginning was psychoanalysis, Freud's psycho-analysis, the early intellectua