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The 20-year contributions of Paul Gray to the technique of psychoanalysis are, for some, profoundly innovative and deceptively simple; for others, they are an unquestioned part of correctly applied standard technique. As one reads this collection of essays, one easily senses why “close process attention” has come to be an inevitable and important part of modern technique. For newcomers and experienced analysts alike, Gray's emphasis on the here-and-now analysis of defense will certainly seem self-evident, disciplined, and beyond reproof, and, in the right hands, marvelously simple. In keeping with the spirit of Gray's work, that jargon and premature theorizing are sparingly used by the contributors to this volume, most of whom relish turning to clinical material. In their unwavering attention to the patient's productions, they epitomize the best traditions of analytic hover, recognizing clinical material as the best data available on which to base conclusions.
This book of 13 chapters may roughly be separated into three areas: a) explications of the history and current use of close process attention; b) its technical implications for certain situations like dreams, free association, and impulse control; and c) soul-searching about the theory of close process attention and its clinical fate.
I found in the exposition of close process monitoring in the first two chapters, “Defense Analysis and Mutative Interpretation” by