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Professor Tähkäs text-book, first published in Finnish in 1970, has amazingly enough not been translated earlier. This Danish edition (by Henning Paikin) is based on the manuscript of the 3rd Finnish edition from 1982.
The book contains three parts, an introduction to the relevant theory, the main chapters concerning psychotherapy, and an addendum which has been published in this journal (2:113-132,1979) concerning an integration of newer theory in the predominant psychodynamic approach to psychotherapy, that forms the main content of the book.
The first part is—as is the whole book—very well worked through, clear and well-arranged. In the main part, definitions of the basic concepts of psychotherapy are given. Supportative and explorative therapies are carefully distinguished, and this classification is maintained in the rest of the book in a very instructive way. After this, chapters on the patient, the therapeutical contract, the outer frames of therapy and the therapeutic process follow. The exposition is thorough, comprehensive and detailed, and one has the feeling that everything has been used and discussed, and that many questions have been posed and answered before the final manuscript was written. In this way, the text gives ample advice both to the beginner and to the advanced student.
The author has a very high academic standard. All the way through, he has preferred to recount in his own way, a little ex cathedra, with few quotations, thereby giving the text egality and wholeness. The reader is nowhere presented with either old or new controversies of psychoanalytic theory, which in this context is an evident advantage. What we have is the well-motivated, justifiable view of its author. Other views can be discussed by the readers (the group of students) or found in the references.