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Dr. Lindon has long been interested in the psychoanalysis of schizophrenics and has published in this area. He is on the faculty of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute and is Editor of “The Psychoanalytic Forum.”
This exciting book should be read by everyone who uses psychotherapy to treat schizophrenic and character disorders. The crisp, clear writing, rich in clinical material, enables the reader to follow the authors' reasoning to their conclusion “… that for the present there exists no treatment method which offers as much hope as psychoanalysis …” for these most disturbed patients.
Boyer and Giovacchini raise interesting questions: What enables us to tolerate patients at all? Solely some specific internal need of our own? Are special emotional constellations required of the therapist to treat character disorders and schizophrenias? Was Freud really treating schizophrenics and not recognizing them as such? And some questions of technique: What to do when a patient shows up at your office completely naked, saying “now he is hiding nothing”? What to do with an adolescent boy who has a letter opener dangerously close to the therapist's chest? …
Throughout the book the authors reexamine
L. Bryce Boyer, M.D. and Peter L. Giovacchini, M.D., New York: International Science Press, 1967.
what is analyzable and what is not analyzable—and what makes it so. The book begins with a review of the literature on these questions by Dr. Boyer, who then presents his own experience with schizophrenic patients. Outstanding is his clinical reporting of his 17 years of “Office Treatment of Schizophrenic Patients,”2 using classical psychoanalysis, couch and all. Also noteworthy is the chapter by Dr. Edward Hoedemaker who examines some countertransference elements with such excellent description that one almost shares Hoedemaker's mounting rage towards the patient he describes.
The remaining chapters are by Dr. Giovacchini who beautifully reviews the suitability of the psycho