You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is an exceedingly valuable book by a physician who combines a thorough knowledge of natural science methods with a genuine respect for the intangible and often incommunicable processes of psychotherapy. The behavioral sciences have been held up for the last twenty-five years by attempts to use rating scales and similar clumsy devices to give an aura of science where a precise methodology was not yet possible. This book with its some 200 pages of selections from recordings of 315 interviews with a single patient, arranged around a single theme of mother-daughter relationship, is a significant addition to the progress of using modern recording devices to replace the disciplined intuition of individual behavioral sciences. The selection of one theme from the unmanageable mass of a recorded total analysis is an important contribution to methods of presenting such material. Dr. Abramson has also used the recordings for a therapeutic innovation, the capitulation dinner, in which the patient is introduced later in therapy to recordings of what was said earlier.
The book is a contribution also to the psychosomatic theory of allergies and to the general theory of mother-child relationships. Dr. Abramson advances as an alternate to theories of over-all parental rejection—as the determinant of an allergic reaction—a theory of parental engulfment in which a narcissistic parent responds—not to the whole child—but to the allergic child, in a way which prevents the child's development of independence and perpetuates the allergic attacks as a response to situations invoking the original, or continuing dependency. The book is a story of a woman with eczema, herself married with a daughter, and her emerging understanding of her relationship with her own mother. But there are excerpts and brief discussions of other types of cases which round out Dr. Abramson's theory of the way in which a child with an intractable allergy may become engulfed in the parent's rejecting anger over th