In an age when short-term therapy is often either mandated by managed care or selected by clinicians as the preferred modality, Don't Lose Your Patients! is a valuable contribution to the practitioner's literature. It may appear at first glance that the very idea that therapists would be concerned with premature termination (the major theme of this book), is a kind of a paradox in this day and age. Many clinicians are currently given time limits by third parties, and numerous patients enter therapy with an abbreviated treatment duration in mind. In these situations, there appears to be no place for the concept of “premature” termination since in some ways the beginning and end of the treatment are fused.

However, as Strean points out, many times a predetermined brief treatment may appear to therapists as a fait accompli, while it is rather, a camouflage for underlying fears and anxieties of the patient. Moreover, the author writes that the therapist population has become inured to these “realities”-and clinicians often are unaware of their