You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Oremland has attacked one of the toughest problems in psychoanalysis with vigor and authority—the nature of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and its relation to psychoanalysis. In this ambitious attempt to redefine the differences between psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and the supportive therapies, he has proposed a rigorous new conception of a psychoanalytic
psychotherapy of wide-ranging importance. Oremland brings impressive credentials to this task both as a leading psychoanalyst and as Director of the San Francisco Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
The problem of distinguishing psychoanalysis from other psychotherapies based to a greater or lesser degree on psychoanalytic theories or techniques has bedeviled American psychoanalysis since the first decade of the century. The smoldering dispute over what psychoanalysis is and how it differs from psychoanalytic psychotherapy reached a crisis in the 1940s and 1950s with the direct challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment by Franz Alexander (1950), who proposed that a suggestive variation of psychotherapy developed by him should be accepted as within the definition of “psychoanalysis.” Alexander's heresy provoked a series of panels and papers, most of which were published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in the mid-1950s. Almost all contributors recognized psychoanalysis at one pole and supportive therapy at the other pole, with various modes in between, usually called “exploratory” or “expressive” psychotherapy, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, dynamic psychiatry, or analytic therapy. Rangell (1954) recognized two divergent points of view behind these debates: “(1) Those who feel that there is a continuum, with no discernible or practical line of demarcation, between the two disciplines”; and “(2) the other point of view holds that the two are separable and distinct entities and procedures, with delineable borders between them.” (p. 736