Psychoanalytic Explorations of Technique: Discourse on the Theory of Therapy. Harold P. Blum (Ed.) New York:  International Universities Press, 1980.  viii + 468 pp.

Blum has taken a supplementary issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, added three classic papers on technique by Eissler, Greenacre, and Spitz, and an extended critical review of recent psychoanalytic books by Kanzer, and emerged with a most interesting and valuable book on classical psychoanalytic technique.

Internationally known contributors present original papers on a wide gamut of essential psychoanalytic topics. Important issues such as genetic reconstruction and interpretation in the here and now, the role of insight, the nature of therapeutic action, the working alliance, the widened scope of psychoanalysis, varied conceptions of the transference, and more are all represented. One is treated to a feast where cogent observations regarding essential aspects of analytic work are offered in literate and relatively nonjargonistic form. The intimate connection between clinical practice and theory is ‘evident throughout the book.

Anna Freud, in the first of four papers on insight, observes that she merely classed children's lack of insight with other aspects of immaturity and never made the quality of insight a special subject of study. Miss Freud then raises and discusses some salient questions stemming from the absence of insight in child analysis. Hansi Kennedy presents a developmental viewpoint of the role of insight in child analysis. A developmental line for the capacity for insight is described and the implications for analysis of children at various age levels considered. “Analytic insights” gained during treatment in the prelatency child is subject to infantile amnesia and their “analytic understanding” becomes absorbed into the general experiential matrix. Work with children is “aimed at fostering self-awareness and self-knowledge.” Insight itself, even with adolescents, with its attendant focus on the past and reconstruction, is subordinated by children to immediate factors and environmental presses. Peter B. Neubauer emphasizes t