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Although well worth reading, this book has several glaring flaws. The first has to do with Peterfreund's great interest in information processing theory (IPT). Although, and perhaps because he has made several important contributions to the psychoanalytic literature in that area, in this book he uses IPT in a way that almost amounts to an obsession. Since the book aims to be a clinical presentation, not a text on information processing, this is particularly bothersome. The terms and concepts of IPT are everywhere, and, instead of illuminating clinical phenomena and technique, they obfuscate and distract. It would seem that IPT does not inherently lend itself to good clinical description. It is dry, unpoetic, even stark. Unfortunately, the difficulty here is compounded by Peterfreund's use of IPT concepts in a way that distances his material from the clinician. The following illustration from the middle of a case description is typical. After making the point that the analyst's ever-hovering or suspended attention is not passive, Peterfreund goes on (p. 116) to describe what he did in information-processing terms:
I had to allow a free memory search and the input of a vast amount of relevant information …. The information had to be sorted, grouped, and patterned. A trial-and-error process was set up, with constant testing of tentative hypotheses as I attempted to match the input information against various “standards” and rate the matchings for best fit.
I find it hard to imagine that clinicians would find extensive information processing descriptions of this type very helpful, even though they may be quite accurate. Good clinical description is plentiful in this book, but infor mation processing terms are intermingled in such a way as to make them unavoidable. All too often, the reader encounters a potentially interesting description of the author's thinking, (“I was attempting to capture exactly what his current emotional world was like, what he was experiencing …”),