Psychoanalytic Practice.: Helmut Thomä, Horst Kächele. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987

Psychoanalysis has grown tremendously since the days of Freud. The diversity within our field makes our task of learning what psychoanalysis is all about more and more complex. Helmut Thomä and Horst Kächele, both Professors of Psychoanalysis at the University of Ulm, Germany, have published a very comprehensive textbook on the development of psychoanalysis, and the stage we have reached today. They have written a first volume covering the principles of the psychoanalytic method. The book originally appeared in German in 1985, but has now been translated into English. A second volume dealing with the psychoanalytic dialogue has appeared in German and will be published in English in 1989. There is a large wealth of central-European psychoanalytic writing which is seldom known to those who do not read German journals regularly. Thomä and Kächele provide a good introduction to the discussions and work published in German. They have made an excellent contribution, allowing an English-speaking audience to become acquainted with important work in psychoanalysis carried out during recent years by German speaking analysts.

Thomä and Kächele have their home-base in Ulm, Germany, where they are experienced training analysts at the Psychoanalytic Institute; at the same time, they have built up the Department for Psychotherapy at the University of Ulm. The work described in this book has grown out of their research experiences in Ulm. Their “data-bank” consists of an