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The title of the book is challenging: Psychosemiosis as a key to body-mind continuum. If it had been possible to deliver what it promises, it would have been a sensation. However, something more like the subtitle would give a truer picture of the content of the book, for example “the use of a symbolization - reflectiveness model in psychotherapy”. This is good enough. Eight of the ten articles have been published before (between 1997 and 2003) in different English speaking journals. The English in most of these articles is acceptable, but the book as a whole would have needed an editing process to bring it up to scratch. These remarks being made, I must add that the clinical material is a real gift to the reader.
The strength of this book lies in the clinical case material, which in detail illustrates how it is possible, in a psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic process, to work with severely disturbed borderline patients, helping them to gain a more autonomous life, in work and in relationships. This is a needed voice, especially these days, when strong anti-psychodynamic winds are blowing and pharmacological treatments are favoured, sometimes combined only with short-term behaviour therapy. Dr Matti Keinanen, who is a senior lecturer in psychiatry and clinical psychology at Turku University, Finland, quotes a Chinese saying: “If you want to help a man one day, give him a fish (the medicine); if you want to help a man the whole life, teach him to fish himself (the therapeutic process)” (p. 170). Keinanen strives to help the patient “fish for himself”, and this is what he sets out to do. In this collection of articles, he presents the work and the theoretical and clinical model he uses.
The author is generous with his experience working with long-term psychotherapeutic treatment of patients with borderline personality disorders at the students' health care centre in Turku. The basis for his psychothera-peutic approach is the view that each individual patient should receiv