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This is a gem of a book, probably the most helpful introductory text and practical guide to the conduct of psychotherapy now available. What makes it so special are the extensive clinical dialogues—what the patient says and what the therapist says—the kind of detailed and vivid exchanges that student thereapists are so hungry to hear and teaching therapists are so reluctant to furnish. Dr. Basch, a training and supervising analyst at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, has written the book that he would like to have read as a student:
It never helped me much to hear or read that this or that was interpreted to the patient, or that the patient was confronted with such and such. What I wanted to know was what the therapist actually said, and how he got to the point where he
Page 307said it, and then what happened? Most important, what was said that didn't work and how did one get the treatment back on the track after making inaccurate, unproductive, and/or mistaken attempts at confrontation, clarification, or interpretation, as I always seemed to do?
With modesty and consistent good sense, he demonstrates what can actually go on in psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. The material is organized around specific treatment issues with various types of patients. The clinical examples are then used to derive the technical principles and underlying theoretical rationale which form the basis for therapeutic intervention. Dr. Basch's approach is active, dynamic, and analytic in that the transference relationship is at the heart of interpretive management. He believes that hiding behind “analytic silence” for fear of being wrong can be a much more serious error than any mistakes that might be made in actively trying to understand the patient. At all times he is exquisitely sensitive to and supportive of the patient's dignity and self-esteem. The book is an important addition to the growing corpus of literature we are getting from self psychology.
The opening chapters illustra