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Greenson's work is addressed to the analytic student who requires a readable, clear comprehensive text, as well as to the experienced psychoanalytic practitioner who may find benefit in a systematic review of technique. This is the most significant book on technique since Fenichel's Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique .
The volume is divided into four chapters: Survey of Basic Concepts, Resistance, Transference, and The Psychoanalytic Situation. In the first chapter Greenson traces the historical development of psychoanalytic therapy, describes the theoretical concepts essential for technique, and discusses indications and counterindications for analytic therapy. The chapter on resistance contains a discussion of theory, classification, and technique of analyzing resistance. Greenson devotes the bulk of his book to transference, the chapter in which he presents: a historical survey, a detailed exposition of the working alliance and of the transference neurosis, a classification of transference reactions and transference resistances, and a description of the technique of analyzing transference. The last chapter deals with the demands the analytic situation makes upon the patient and upon the analyst.
Perhaps Greenson's most outstanding single achievement is his description of the comparative role of distinct yet partially overlapping aspects of the patient's relationship to his analyst: the working alliance, the transference neurosis, and reality perception of the analyst. Dangers to treatment may ensue if these factors are out of balance. On the one hand, a neglect of the working alliance may lead to intense, confused, overwhelming transference. This results in analytic failure because insights cannot be adequately integrated by an insufficiently reasonable ego that has been traumatized by poor technique. On the other hand, too much emphasis upon the working alliance can be associated with weak, intellectualized transference reactions. Failure here results from a ste