Description
The manifest purpose of this interesting volume is an examination of the authors’ experience in extending the use of psychoanalytic techniques to the treatment of classes of patients for whom Freud believed them to be inappropriate. One anticipates the book’s conclusion—that the use of analytic techniques can be so extended—and indeed this is the postulate of the volume. But such a change, based as it is on the reinterpretation of important elements of the original theory of psychoanalysis, invites the inference that theoretical as well as technical developments are taking place. Perhaps the therapeutic situation is to be understood in a new way also, and the old technical vocabulary infused with new meaning. It is this line of thinking which sustained the reviewer’s attention in his task of evaluating the book for others.
