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Buechler, S. (2008). Making a Difference in Patients’ Lives: Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting. Paperback. New York: Routledge, 317 pp., $34.95.
In this remarkably influential volume, Sandra Buechler, a polished writer and seasoned clinician, not only shares her evolving ideas about how to become a better psychoanalyst, but also, in so doing, provides a synthesis of emotion theory with what self psychologists have long understood about the powerful use of the empathic mode in promoting therapeutic change (see Chernus, 1988, 2002). I believe that this constitutes a unique and important contribution to the psychoanalytic self psychology literature.
Furthermore, Buechler views the psychoanalytic psychotherapies as existing on a continuum, rather than differentiated by variables such as professional discipline, frequency of sessions, or use of the proverbial psychoanalytic couch. Therefore, Buechler's ideas are relevant to all psychotherapists utilizing a psychoanalytic framework for understanding the treatment process, not only to psychoanalysts training candidates in formal psychoanalytic institutes.
Tightly organized and highly informative, this book can function as a reference book, since it cannot be fully digested in one cursory reading. The first two chapters provide a theoretical context for the following five chapters, all of which address particular emotions and refer back to the author's “basic assumptions about human emotions,” as developed in Chapter 1, and her sophisticated analysis of the process of maintaining analytic empathy, as delineated in Chapter 2. Here she builds on the work of self psychologists about the important role of the empathic mode in both understanding our patients’ inner world and communicating this understanding to them. I believe that in so doing, Buechler enriches our understanding of therapeutic empathy and thereby contributes to the evolution of self psychology as an ongoing, continually evolving psychoanalytic paradig