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.
Dr. Gerald Caplan is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has edited Emotional Problems in Early Childhood, Prevention of Mental Disorders in Children, and Adolescence: Psychosocial Perspectives. He has written Principles of Preventive Psychiatry, the first volume in the trilogy of which the volume under review is the second offering. The third in the series will be concerned with problems of community practice in the mental health field. If it is the contribution that its predecessors have been, we most eagerly await it.
Perhaps it is a mark of the extent of the contribution that Caplan himself here has issued a caveat. In the Preface, he tells us that this book is “uneven in quality,” incomplete, and only “intended as a general guide.” It is, however, the latter warning that we must really hear so that we will remain flexible and open. While the book is indeed uneven, it is not seriously so.
Caplan also notes that this major model of consultation, as with Lindemann's approach with which it was later linked, was not “a result of planning based on theory.” Well, perhaps not explicitly, but certainly both have been well grounded in psychoanalytic sophistication and insights—as seen, for example, in the influence on their work of loss theory—and also extensive experience. We maintain that this is true despite such relatively slight lapses as “… customary procedure in analytic psychotherapy in which, unless one is treating a patient with a very fragile ego, the therapist tries to maintain as high a level of emotional tension as possible. The purpose of this in psychotherapy is to force unconscious material to the surface …” (p. 203). We also question Caplan when, to aid in dissipating distorted institution-based expectations, he advises that the entering consultant “… should allow the staff full freedom to manipulate him …” (p. 56). Surely this must be seen, for example, as poor training for that ins