Adult Personality Growth in Psychotherapy, by Mardi J. Horowitz,  Cambridge University Press, New York, 2016,  148 pp.

I became familiar with Horowitz's work in an ongoing upper division class on “Modifications of Classical Psychoanalysis” I taught at The Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (now New Center for Psycho-Analysis). During this time, Horowitz began publishing the beginning of a long series of research and clinically based papers and books related to stress, states of mind, posttraumatic stress disorder, and personality styles. Since then Horowitz has received two MacArthur “Genius Grants,” along with awards for his research from the American Psychiatric Association and International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He has also continuously carried on with research work, published, and taught at the University of California (San Francisco) School of Medicine. There, he is also founder and director of the MacArthur Program in Conscious and Unconscious Process, along with being Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. What makes Horowitz unique, in my understanding, among both psychoanalytic researchers and psychiatric academicians, is his long-term commitment to viewing clinical material from three differing points of view: (1) Developmental and through a neuroscience lens; (2) Cognitive and behavioral therapy; (3) Psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

This book reflects his ongoing eclectic approaches in his writing and practice. Because of the density and complexity of Horowitz's ideas, I can provide only a brief summary of Horowitz's ideas and approaches. I felt I could not adequately convey a complete enough presentation, as an introduction, of how and why his particular approaches and interventions are of particular use in the clinical cases he discusses in the book. Comments taken from the book's back jacket best provide a more cogent overview of his work: “Adult personality growth increases self-awareness, amplifies capacities for realizing social cognition, and reduces avoidance via a wider range of safe, emotional responses and mastery of prev