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This volume describes a method of psychoanalytic psychotherapy developed during the past ten years by Mrs. Nelson (for several years, until recently, the Editor of this Review), her husband Dr. Nelson and the other authors, as well as certain colleagues mentioned in the preface, all these being nonmedical psychoanalysts and most of them affiliated with the Training Institute of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.
A paradigm is defined as a showing or saying by example, and paradigmatic psychotherapy is the systematic setting forth of examples by the analyst to enable the patient to understand the significant intrapsychic processes or interpersonal situations of his life, past and present. The technique is seen as most appropriate for borderline patients who are unable to utilize the verbal interpretations basic to the usual psychoanalytic approach, but it is a technique which the authors convincingly demonstrate to have implications for the treatment of virtually every patient. Various of the chapters describe its use in the treatment of children and adolescents, in low income patients, in group therapy and in social casework treatment.
The technique, first reported in Mrs. Nelson's paper in 1956, “Externalization of the Toxic Introject,” has been developed by her and her colleagues since then into diverse, highly flexible and oftentimes admirably creative forms.
Sherman illustrates the “technique of joining with the irrational aspects of a patient's responses and thus inducing him to oppose his own pathology, which the therapist has now taken over. When this technique is followed persistently, it soon appears that the patient is much more reasonable and healthy than the therapist, who then appears as a paradigm of the patient's own presenting pathology” (p. 75). Various of the