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Stanley Lesse is the editor in chief of the American Journal of Psychotherapy and president of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Ordinarily a book of papers compiled around a central theme suffers both from the variability in quality that comes from assigning topics to various people on a single theme and from loose connectedness to the main theme that leaves the reader with a sense of having read a series of miscellaneous papers he could have read in any journal. Lesse, being an author and an editor, has a developed sense of criticism. He knows how to choose good papers and how to push the writers to do a better than ordinary job, and he himself writes clearly.
This book is remarkably free of the usual thin research reports. Lesse as a clinician chooses material of interest to the practitioner. Many of the thirty-three authors have a breadth of understanding of the research territory so that they can focus on the specifics of the process of data collecting and evaluation for a stimulating peek into the results. Research in such evaluation is in a preliminary stage, but this is an exciting book for anyone interested in evaluation of psychotherapy.
There is an excellent section of one hundred pages on the influence of psychocultural factors on the expansion of the psychotherapeutic world. Russian therapists are our allies, and the witchcraft of Liberia cures patients. Is all psychotherapy implicit hypnosis? Africa, Puerto Rico, Japan, even midtown Manhattan, sound like a new America with new psychotherapies. The new terminology of the sociologist and the communication expert broadens the clinician and may even help the researcher. This book is one meeting place for them. It even made me stop to think, and that I find an infrequent experience.
The editor himself writes a chapter on the intensity of anxiety and its relationship to the treatment process which is well worth the book. One ten-year study on follow-up and one evaluation of improvement in br