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We would like to thank the editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Elliot Jurist, PhD, and Joseph S Reynoso, PhD, the Journal's Book Review editor, for this opportunity to review this text. As a primer of psychoanalytical theory and practice written for professionals-in-training, they asked a psychoanalyst-academician/program director and a doctoral student in clinical psychology to perform this review. As part of this process, we undertook a sampling of other extant primers in psychoanalytical theory and practice. The relative paucity of such works is unfortunate, and we thus welcome Dr Bach's efforts. This is all the more important given the absence of psychoanalytical theory and practice offered in the curricula of graduate clinical psychology programs, psychiatry residencies, etc.
The sampling of the salient and decidedly limited palette includes the following texts (some may disagree with the inclusion of certain of these in the category of “primers,” per se): An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis by Charles Brenner, MD (1955/1974); Clinical Values: Emotions that Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment by Sandra Buechler, PhD (2004); Learning from Experience: A Guidebook for Clinicians by Marilyn Charles, PhD (2004); Object-Relations and Self-Psychology: An Introduction, Fourth Edition, by Michael Saint Clair, PhD (2004); and Object-Relations & Self-Psychology: A User-Friendly Primer, by Barry Joseph Weber, MDiv, PhD and David L. Downing, PsyD, ABPP (2009). These primers vary by degrees in terms of the depth to which theory is explicated, as well as which theory/theories within the psychoanalytical movement tend to be presented. In particular, Brenner's text (originally published in 1955, with many subsequent reprintings and revisions) remains a most seminal touchstone for any introduction to so-called “Classical Psychoanalysis.” Brenner's explication of arcane psychoanalytical theoretical constructs is masterful—if somewhat impenetrable, itself. The Saint Clair (2004, F