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Herman is a psychotherapist who spent many years as a general medical practioner before coming to psychotherapy training via psychiatry. With this background, having been confronted by intractable problems of neurosis in her patients, and then having made the decision to do further training to be able to tackle these problems constructively, she should be in a good position to answer the question, “Why Psychotherapy?” Unfortunately, her experience of psychiatry seems to have been a bad one (“a distressing, painful sentence”). This means that her answer may not be generally applicable.
In a slim volume, she manages to give an understandable and interesting account of the history and development of psychoanalytic theories, particularly of Freud, Klein and Bion. In this framework, she gives an account of the development, healthy and otherwise, of the individual. Brief accounts of some of Freud's and Klein's case histories are included. A chapter entitled “The Opposition's Case” is devoted to looking at opposition to psychotherapy, mainly from psychiatry. Herman considers the opposition to arise mainly from envy, the death instinct, and unwillingness to look at the needy part within the self. She discusses the origins of life in the first relationship, and work as a reparative act, before moving on to consider, at some length, the war between the sexes and to praise the development to the full of the bisexual nature within each individual. The final chapter, entitled “Why Psychotherapy?”, starts with another attack on psychiatry and patients who seek psychiatric help. Herman tries, with some success, to link physical illness and emotional states, giving AIDS as one example. She discerns widespread operation of