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This valuable book is a re-issue of a work that first appeared in 1953. Yet its timeliness is marked for it emphasizes the interpersonal and self-psychological elements that are common to every therapeutic situation. The book derives from the field of social casework; and one gets the impression that Dr. Faatz would prefer to reserve its wisdom for that field of endeavor which she calls the “helping process,” for she is at great pains to distinguish casework
from psychotherapy. The distinguishing difference, according to the author, resides in the setting within which the two processes take place: Casework's framework is defined by the reality needs of the client and the function of the agency to which he has turned for help; the psychothera-peutic situation, again according to Dr. Faatz, is free of the encumberance of reality.
Fortunately this theme does not detract from the positive contributions of the book. To my mind, whenever and wherever a psychotherapeutic process operates between two individuals, the need to uncover conflict, to explore the nature of the interpersonal interactions, and to address the deficits in self structure and the inhibitions in self functioning, form the common denominator upon which the endeavor rests. An aspect of this undertaking, coming from any discipline, is most certainly an exploration of whatever realities frame the situation. This led Otto Rank to devote much concern to what he called the “analytic situation” in contrast to the general psychoanalytic approach of his period which tended to neglect (he medium in which the therapeutic process was taking place.
It is to the work of Rank that this book owes its philosophy of therapy. It is an optimistic philosophy which believes that the striving, natural growth process which characterizes all of life expresses itself in the human creature as well. This process has been temporarily restricted in the individual seeking help, and it is the task of the helper in the therapeutic situa