Customer Reviews

Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World

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I won't go into many details here, but Wachtel is a psychoanalyst who, after having discovered more relational-interpersonal and "systems" approaches, realized that if those approaches have any validity, then using behavioral and prescriptive techniques in a psychoanalytic framework would not necessarily "ruin the transference" or do any other horrible thing to the therapy process. His exhaustive research and ability to brilliantly build upon the foundations of researchers such as Dollard & Miller resulted in this medium-thick tome of essential theoretical knowledge for theory-integrationists everywhere.

If you are open-minded (and in my opinion, "flexibly minded") and want to take advantage of the best of the analytic and behavioral worlds, as well as a brief dip into the relational-interpersonal, read this book. Can't rate it with six stars so I give it five. You will be well-armed to deflect any critiques of your adherence to more than one theory, particularly if you have an analytic and/or behavioral bent, and your theoretical grounding will benefit. Also excellent is his book on therapeutic communication, "Therapeutic Communication: Knowing What to Say When."