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Books about psychoanalysis tend to be either vast and indigestible or uncritically simplistic. Often they appear to emanate from an arcane pre-21st Century world in which patients luxuriate indefinitely on analyst's couches and where the notion of evidence-based practice is seen as the work of the devil. There is also the perennial theory-practice gap: psychoanalytic theories abound, but bear a tenuous relationship to what goes on in the consulting room, and what is distinctive about psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method.
Jeremy Safran, a leading psychodynamic psychotherapy researcher and teacher, and former chair of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, deftly avoids these and other pitfalls in this laudable, readable, and reliable introductory text.
The bulk of the book, and its accompanying DVD, is devoted to an exposition of the techniques, achievements and problems of real-life psychoanalytic therapy as exemplified by his work with “Simone” (? someone/every woman), an African American young woman suffering from depression, bulimia, and relationship difficulties. This is buttressed before and after with a brief history of the psychoanalytic movement and consideration of its evaluation and possible future developments. Safran adopts throughout an enquiring, unpartisan, clinically oriented, social-relational perspective.
He starts by locating the origins of psychoanalysis in its historical context of alienated Jewish intellectuals at the threshold of the modern world. He argues that their marginal social status gave Freud and his followers a vantage point from which to critique the dehumanized post-Enlightenment environment they encountered. This countercultural vantage point is one of the guiding threads of the book. Safran sees the reflective psychoanalytic stance as a counterpoint to the emphasis on speed, superficial goals, and fragile search for “success” that permeates Western culture, including nonpsychoanalytic therap