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This book is the third of a four-volume series by the members of the Downstate Psychoanalytic Training Institute, on its twenty-fifth anniversary. Four volumes represent quite a bit of anniversarying: Does the quality match the celebration?
The composite, rather than integrative, texture of the book can be sensed from such disparate titles as: “Sand Symbolism: The Primary Dream Representation of the Isakower Phenomenon and of Smoking Addictions,” “Urinary Drives and Creativity,” “The Influence of the Medusa Myth on the Psychology of the Female,” and “Milk Without Sucking: A Clinical Vignette.” The result, while intermittently interesting, is almost a yearbook or scrapbook that has neither the integrity of a book nor the virtue — as the title, Clinical Psychoanalysis, promises — of an unfolding sequence of chapters developing in depth a cohesive idea or viewpoint. The volume is a collage, not a portrait.
Papers range from the significant to the trivial; the length of the papers from over forty to barely two pages. The two-pager addresses the pressing issue, too long overlooked by psychoanalysts, why certain Hungarian wines are supposed to possess magical qualities. Well, as in Little League, the book gives everyone at Downstate a turn at bat.
Having stated the negative, let us turn to the positive. Dickies, in a theoretical and scholarly paper, distinguishes between two closely allied concepts, the therapeutic alliance and the working alliance. Focusing these overlapping, yet differentiable, dimensions of the analyst-patient collaboration, he illuminates issues in the handling of the disruption of either working bond. Kestenberg's chapter examines fatherhood as a life phase. A deep look at the polarities of tenderness and aggression in parenting demonstrates the vicissitudes and growth potential in this endeavor. Kaplan's contribution, also in the developmental area, marshals clinical evidence that parent-child relationships proceed adequately until the developmental le