Concise Guide to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Principles and Techniques in the Era of Managed Care, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Excellent text for learning and review
Review: Excellent book that is factual and clinically sensitibve. The authors must be superb clinicians as well as teachers.

Rating:
Summary: Workmanlike and decent
Review: This book does a fairly good job of explaining and illustrating basic concepts of psychodynamic therapy. Clinical material fleshes out the conceptual aspect of the book. The writing is clear and accessible, making the book didactically useful.

The book is somewhat uninspired in quality. It does not make for an exciting or penetrating description of therapy.

There is no consideration or integration with other theoretical approaches. This is not surprising in a book on dynamic therapy, but it would have been useful for the authors to consider how dynamic techniques might interface with strategies from other approaches. The book gives the impression that dynamic therapy is simply the way to go, aa view not at all supported by research.

One annoying and rather bizarre characteristic of the book is that the authors write as if dynamic therapists were almost all physicians! They consistently write things like, "The psychiatrist should remember..." "The physician conducting dynamic therapy..." One wonders what planet they live on, in that everyone in the mental health field knows that the vast majority of therapy is provided by psychologists, social workers, and couselors, and psychiatrists spend most or all of their time prescribing medications.