Getting Practical in Analysis: A Review of Owen Renik's Practical Psychoanalysis for Therapists and Patients

Owen Renik has played an important role in the relational evolution. Most contemporary analysts have read Renik's innovative papers, many of which have become classics in our field. As Editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Renik transformed that leading journal, positioning it among the vanguard of publications that have reshaped the relational psychoanalytic landscape. Under Renik's guardianship, the portals of the Quarterly opened wide to those advancing the newer two-person ideas.

Now we have this respected thinker's first book, Practical Psychoanalysis for Therapists and Patients, and as one might expect based on the corpus of his work, Renik takes an original, controversial position. He is highly critical of past analysts' failure to challenge the venerated assumptions and ideals—the “received wisdom”—of our psychoanalytic forebears. Renik himself is a product of the last century and was trained during the days when ego psychology dominated psychoanalytic thinking. He has not, however, allowed the positivist conventions of the past to inhibit his intellectual freedom and creativity, and he is impatient with the gradual pace of progress in psychoanalysis. Approaching analysts as scientist-practitioners, he reminds us that psychoanalysis is a scientifically-based study of the mind, and as in any science, concepts are created to be destroyed by the accumulating empirical evidence. As he scrutinizes the theory and, especially, the applied practice of psychoanalysis, he holds nothing sacred, retaining what he views as useful and tossing out what he judges as antiquated. The result is to effectively turn traditional psychoanalysis—that is, the “one-person” model of psychoanalysis—on its head.