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Paul Wachtel is widely recognized and lauded for his integrative papers and books that have informed and educated mental health professionals for over 5 decades. Indeed, his 2011 textbook Therapeutic Communication: Knowing What to Say When has become a veritable staple in psychiatric residency programs since its publication. Given the sad, stultifying deemphasis in psychotherapy training in residency programs, his efforts to introduce different traditions, approaches, and methods and apply them pragmatically to patient care is a boon for the profession and especially trainees who clamor for ways to listen, understand, and then intervene as fully engaged and knowledgeable clinicians.
Wachtel's latest book continues to expand on his lifetime achievement to enhance the practitioner's appreciation of the overlap and differences in contemporary psychotherapeutic methods. These include psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, attachment, and acceptance-based models. In Making Room for the Disavowed he goes about this integrative task with a new and discriminating twist. While still bringing to bear his encyclopedic knowledge of the applications of each of the major schools of psychotherapy, he chooses to tackle his subject through the lens of one central topic—disavowal.
This volume is a comprehensive, scholarly, and heartfelt elaboration of an earlier chapter (and includes a plethora of case examples, interventions, comparisons and contrasts, and personal observations about problems one encounters when practicing psychotherapy that can and should be rectified). One key take home point of the current book is the reminder to value when to stay at the psychological surface and to respect the phenomenological approach. Wachtel advises beginning and continuing treatment by befriending the patient with a “welcoming in” and “making room for” strategy that honors the individual's fears as well as their desires, their abilities as well as their problems. The overall approa