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For many years we have been hearing about the dearth of books on analytic technique. Now there is a flood. One of the latest to come our way is Langs. What does he have to offer us? Is this two-volume work suffioiently different from Greenson's and others' to be worth our while? I think so. There is a line of increasing clinical detail from Fenichel through Greenson to Langs, and this increment of detail is of great value in helping us to narrow the gap between theory and practice. But isn't this Greenson's contribution? Greenson gave us a very clear description of middle-level abstractions—viz., the working alliance and the transference neurosis—with examples. Langs develops Greenson further—not only by providing greater specificity to technical percepts, but also by showing how analytic thinking and technique can be applied to nonanalytic cases, and this is no small achievement, especially in today's therapeutic world. In fact, his singular contribution is the demonstration of how adaptable the analytic model is to a wide variety of cases in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. His clinical experience in supervision, as outlined in his preface, parallels my own very closely:
This book grew largely out of my experiences as a supervisor of psychotherapy at the Hillside Hospital Division of the Long Island Jewish-Hillside Medical Center in Glen Oaks, New York. I went there trained in psychoanalysis and experienced in psychoanalytically founded psychotherapy. I went knowing that there were many other ways of doing therapy besides my own, and fully expecting to find, as I worked with psychiatric residents and postgraduate fellows in psychotherapy who had been taught these other techniques, that I would learn something of the elements common to sound psychotherapy, whatever its orientation. Much to my surprise, I discovered something quite different I found that the therapeutic work that I supervised fell into two main groupings: sound and unsound. In the former, psychoanalytic