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My first year of residency was internal medicine and the attending was a mild provocateur who routinely asked us to present the review of systems from foot to head instead of the traditional head to foot method. Accordingly, my review starts from the end of the carefully organized book by the psychiatric psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan and his psychologist son Kevin Volkan.
Vamik Volkan, M.D., is emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and an emeritus training and supervising analyst at the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Center. Kevin Volkan, Ed.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., is professor of psychology at California State University Channel Islands. Both father and son have many accolades and honors that are detailed in an “About the Authors” section at the beginning of the book.
The “Coda” concludes their book with a series of bullet points about what they intended the reader to have grasped of the developments and principles of contemporary psychoanalysis. Those form an excellent orientation for what is in the book and will be the substance of this review.
Eight points are listed. First the authors highlight the patients with “low-level personality organization” being treated in the widened scope of psychoanalytic treatments. An emphasis is placed on using an understanding of “internal psychological structures” to inform modifications of usual psychoanalytic techniques. The early portions of the book lay a
foundation for this by defining terms by asking questions such as what is a psychoanalyst, what are the differences between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, what is the tripartite construct of the mind, what is transference or countertransference, what is resistance, and what are developmental levels and how do they influence decisions about treatment? Each of the chapters considering these topics is carefully organized and arranged as a building block for the reader to integrate. This is a pattern adhered to throughout the book.
Second