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Robert Wallerstein's The Talking Cures: The Psychoanalyses and the Psychotherapies is not a book for reading, it is a compendium, nearly 600 pages long, for consulting. Each of its 25 chapters is a survey of a particular concept of controversy involved in the history of definitions of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Each contains a potted minihistory or two or three, many digests of relevant articles and books, reports on symposia and conferences and special issues of journals, long quotations cut and pasted in by computer, summaries of already published summaries (so many of which were written by Robert Wallerstein that this volume is, in effect, his collected articles abstracted). The standard doctoral dissertation format, the “survey of the literature,” is used everywhere. Especially important pieces of the literature are cited dozens of times, chapter after chapter. There are lists upon lists of topics and events—and the master list of the volume's main historical milestones is repeated constantly. Sentences go on for line after line, often doing and undoing themselves, straining sense and grammar excruciatingly. I imagine that most readers—or consulters—will, as antidotes to dizziness or drowsiness, fantasize that The Talking Cures might suddenly have the virtue of being, like Laplanche and Pontalis's The Language of Psychoanalysis, alphabetical; or they will fantasize a fleet, graceful, exciting book rising out of this lumbering giant and giving them reading pleasure.
It is depressing to think that a compendium like this, which has been assembled rather than really composed, will pass for a history, but it will. Only during the last 15 years or so has psychoanalysis had a written history