Learning from the Patient: by Patrick Casement (New York:  Guilford Press, xiv + 386 pp., $35.00)

As psychoanalysts, we learn from our patients. We learn about how to do the work (technique), and we learn about ourselves. Such learning grows out of our direct and immediate experience with our patients. We understand that these two sorts of learning are really integrally linked, two dimensions of a single process, because the analyst works from the center of his own self-awareness. This informs his listening capabilities and perspective and therefore virtually all of his interventions. Limitations, obstacles, or constrictions in the analyst's awareness in relation to a given patient may lead to impasse, stalemate, or “negative therapeutic reaction,” and the fate of the analysis is likely to rest as much in the analyst's personal psychic resources for working through his own counterresistance, counteranxiety, and countertransference as in the patient's capability to work through resistance, anxiety, and transference. This working through on the analyst's side has been traditionally understood as taking place in the analyst's own psychoanalysis or self-analysis, but it may also take place directly or indirectly with the patient in the course of an analysis, and the patient may contribute to it. This process represents an aspect of the analyst's learning from the patient.

Learning from the Patient brings together Patrick Casement's two earlier books on the theme, Learning from the Patient (1985) and Further Learning from the Patient (1990). The book represents Casement's detailed and personal exploration of his own learning process as a psychoanalyst and