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This book is a welcome addition for beginners in psychology and psychotherapy. It gives a well balanced, informed, and up-to-date account of its subject matter, showing clearly the connection between personality theories and clinical approaches. An asset of the book is to guide those venturing in the complex field of treatments in psychotherapy.
The “Introduction” deals with the concepts and theories of personality, varieties of abnormal behaviour, assessment and models of psychological abnormality. The authors are rather critical of the medical model without discussing viable alternatives in such detail. They go on to describe five theoretical approaches: Psychoanalytic, Behavioural, Humanistic, Trait, and Sociocognitive. They are very careful to document any assertion, by the relevant available research data. This gives the book an undogmatic air, which is refreshing. The references are very helpful for both beginners and practitioners in the field.
The two chapters on Psychoanalysis give a historical account of the development of classical Freudian and Post-Freudian ideas (ego psychology, object relations theory, attachment theory and self-psychology). On the evaluation of the scientific status of psychoanalysis, the authors follow the model of credibility of the natural sciences. They assert that the scientific validity of psychoanalysis rests on replicating, in the laboratory, clinical phenomena such as projection, repression etc. They appreciate that such experiments cannot reproduce the complex emotional interaction of the psychoanalytic clinical situation. They conclude that the role of psychology is to set up experiments to investigate the psychological processes which underline the clinical phenomena by psychoanalysis. It is a limitation that they do not discuss the viewpoint of psychoanalysis as a science of meaning, symbolism, and the unconscious processes which by their nature cannot be explained fully within the model of the natural sciences.
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