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The purpose of the book is set forth in the preface:
“I have had a growing conviction that most traditional theoretical and technical papers about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, while perhaps contributing significantly to therapeutic understanding and efficacy, have failed to address a highly significant area: the personal experience, attitudes andinvolvement of the analyst, which contribute importantly to the interpersonal subtleties and unchartered techniques which may, in fact, constitute the effective core of psychotherapy.” (p.XI)
Kenneth A. Frank gathers together a diverse group of papers by Freudians and non-Freudians, some republished here and others written for the first time, sandwiched between an introductory chapter and a conclusion. The quality of the individual contributions varies considerably as might be expected in so widely disparate a group of papers. Particularly noteworthy are the easily available papers by Rosenfeld, Guntrip, and Greenson. An important paper printed here for the first time in English, having been translated from the French, is Masud Khan's: “From Secretiveness to Shared Living.”
Although the book could be of some use to those who like a simple, quick guide to complex ideas, it is on balance not an especially significant piece of research. The best parts of the book are the aforementioned papers, especially Khan's. Frank's introduction and conclusion deal with well known and much discussed ideas. His emphasis upon the analyst as a caring, concerned human is by this time quite generally accepted in orthodox analysis as well as in other forms of therapy. The author's technical presription of the analyst sharing his personal feelings and thoughts with the patient is debatable. While there surely are occassions where a little of this is indicated, in the main too much tends to break down the distinction between the analyst and the patient and skews the treatment away from the patient's problems and towards the analyst