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This is a fascinating and illuminating book mostly to do with “The New Psychoanalysis.” The book is composed of several chapters, each one written by a different author. All of the authors are affiliated with the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. Interestingly, of the 13 authors, 12 are from Ph.D. backgrounds and one is an M.D. For the most part the chapters are informative, deliberate, thoughtful, and reasonably well written. There is a coherency through all the chapters in that all deal with what psychoanalysis should be in this day and age, and what is the part of it that accounts for its therapeutic benefits and what the therapeutic gains that it offers are due to.
The introduction and first chapter, written by Michael Diamond and Christopher Christian, give an overview of where most of these authors see psychoanalysis' beginnings and into what it has evolved, and as such serves as a cornerstone for further chapters. The title of the introduction is “Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action: Where Are We After A Century?” and this title is what the papers and the book itself are about. There are exciting discussions on what the locus of therapy is—insight or relationship—and if the latter, what it is in the relationship that is “curative” and helps people get better, or if not better, happier. (The corrective emotional experience ideas of Franz Alexander are discussed extensively.) This is exciting stuff and discussions about these issues are key to the individual practitioner's identity as a therapist. Many very pertinent questions are asked and discussed—what indeed should the role of the therapist be? Are neuroses developmental deficit disorders stemming from early environmental deficiencies or disorders of conflict between largely unconscious desires and the largely unconscious defenses erected against these desires? Or is it some amalgam of both? Where and in what way should the therapist handle transference? Is the concept of