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Several years ago, I headed a group of psychotherapists in a research project comparing effectiveness of Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) and Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) during one year of treatment of borderline patients. As the two comparison treatments were manualized, we drafted a manual for the control group to describe a supportive psychodynamic treatment. Word of our efforts got around and teachers and researchers from nearby training centers as well as from abroad engaged us in a lively correspondence in which they expressed their frustration in lacking a single basic text from which they could teach the theory and practice the techniques of dynamic psychotherapy with the difficult patients they encountered every day. Sadly, our manual is still a work in progress.
However, our correspondents need wait no longer. The book they have been wanting has been published, not by us, but by a group of teachers at Columbia University headed by Dr. Deborah L. Cabaniss.
The authors prepared themselves for writing this book when several were candidates in Columbia's psychoanalytic institute and were teaching a course on psychodynamic psychotherapy to the psychiatric residents at Presbyterian Hospital. They learned, as it were, the hard way how to convey the concepts and procedures of dynamic psychotherapy to students who concurrently were being exposed to recent developments in neuroscience, developmental studies, social psychology, genetics, and the various other disciplines of their curriculum.
The book is addressed to two classes of readers, to young therapists, beginners in the field who want to learn about psychodynamic psychotherapy and how to do it, and to their teachers, presumably younger faculty members of psychiatric or clinical psychology training programs. As I am neither, but am a retired faculty member who has taught many generations of young therapists, let me add my appreciation as a member of the shrinking class of former teachers; I wish I had