The Craft of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

By (author) Angelica Kaner, Ernst Prelinger

Publication date:

03 March 2005

Length of book:

288 pages

Publisher

Jason Aronson, Inc.

ISBN-13: 9780765703729

This work is an orientation to a craft of great richness and interest. The authors describe the defining elements of the accumulated working knowledge of psychodynamic psychotherapy. It revisits the raw pointedness of old questions: What is psychotherapy? What makes it meaningful? What do I say when a patient asks me how therapy works? How long will it take? How does change happen?
Roy Schafer proclaims on the dust jacket, This book is just what is needed at a time when we are assailed by unwarranted doubts about the uses of therapy. Even though the book deserves a subtitle of mentoring new clinicians, I wish that the Divisionwould send copies of it to all plausibly open-minded directors of graduate programs in clinical psychology. In the earlier part of the book, the language is in the third person. By the last third of the book, the authors' remarks are to you, the new therapist. This is the product of not only much clinical experience and theoretical knowledge, but also the result of much teaching experience. Their teaching covers every subject that a budding therapist might need. It deals with the most practical concernsof setting up a practice and takes the reader into the therapy room for learning what it is that a therapist actually does. The whole book models empathy. The latter attributes, however, enhance the selection of this book for an ideal syllabus for graduate students. It should hold a prime place for the first year people. It is the sort of volume to which one returns with greater and greater appreciation as one gains experience.