Fundamentals of Psychotherapy. By Glen A. Holland. New York:  Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965. 308 pp.

The author decries the confusion that results from multiplicity of languages in the field of psychopathology. He names four sources of overlapping concepts: (1) theory—mostly psychoanalytic, (2) psychiatric diagnoses and classification, (3) projective techniques, and (4) psychotherapy proper. What is needed is one language. He wishes to extend the principles of academic psychology to the field of psychotherapy, stressing such terms as affect, cognitive structure, and communication. In particular, the familiar behavioristic expressions cue, reward, reinforcement, response, and the like become the coin of his realm. The typical student of psychology who wishes to learn psychotherapy could then proceed, utilizing concepts already familiar to him. The trouble with this, however, is that the typical student is not clamoring for more learning theory, but is instead irritated by the laboratory attitudes of their academic instructors. The student, by and large, prefers the language of Freud.

Fundamentals of Psychotherapy is yet another in the long line of books dedicated to simplification and unification of ideas in a very complex field that has so far eluded such efforts. The author's attempt is of particular relevance to readers of The Psychoanalytic Review, since he tries to translate key psychoanalytic principles into the language of learning theory. Holland (a clinical psychologist) eclectically oversimplifies psychoanalytic theory in the name of moderation, utility, and modernization, in a manner not unlike that of the medical establishment. Eissler (a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst) discusses at length in a recent monumental tome, Medical Orthodoxy and the Future of Psychoanalysis, the great dangers to psychoanalysis posed by medical incorporation. Adulteration via eclecticism is the principal danger referred to.

It is question enough whether the author would have presented a cogent communication model for psychological counseling, if he had chosen to so limit his discuss