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The Use of the Self is enormously instructive and a delight to read. Although much of the book is taken from previously published papers, it does not come across as a rehash of already familiar material. Rather, the aggregate gives the reader an opportunity to review and consider the nature of Ted Jacobs's contribution to our contemporary understanding of how an analyst participates in analytic work.
One of the things I noticed immediately is that Ted communicates mainly by example: by far the greatest part of what he has written consists of a series of clinical narratives—the kind of rich, graceful, evocative accounts of an analyst's clinical experience for which Ted is deservedly renowned. Theoretical discussion is, by contrast, relatively sparse, which is interesting because through his vignettes Ted gives us a view of the analyst, with all his or her personal psychology in operation, contributing to a successful psychoanalytic process that is, in my view, even more advanced than the conception of technique that seems to inform the accompanying commentary. As a theoretician Ted is certainly a liberal, but as a clinical illustrator I am convinced that he breaks new ground. In a way, this reflects the state of psychoanalytic affairs in general: it is considerably easier for us to be effective in comparing notes anecdotally about particular clinical events—in supervision, for example—than when we try to formulate a really useful, systematic, and explicit theory of analytic technique.