Principles of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Manual for Supportive-Expressive Treatment Book

Manuals are quite rare in psychodynamic/analytic texts. This book does an excellent job of justifying its existence and construction and goes on to describe the essential tasks of SE therapy and how to go about doing them, with chapters on 3 key therapy processes; supporting, understanding and interpreting. Along the way it makes theoretical comments where appropriate and fills in research findings where they exist. 


Its weakness is in its strength. If you are not setting out to explicitly do SE therapy, the text can feel distant, rigid and sometimes thin. Yet, all therapists must support, understand and interpret, so I do believe it is worthwhile, especially for beginning dynamic therapists who are looking for some concrete tasks and processes to bring into their sessions. 


The book also introduces the concept of the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT). This is something Luborsky writes in more detail about elsewhere, but is certainly the best effort I have seen to capture the issue that appears to me to be at the essence of psychodynamic work- the pathogenic patterns of relating to oneself and others that we try and first determine and then help the patient work through. The CCRT suffers some of the same difficulty as the SE manual, in that it is a contained system that you cannot casually apply to your own work, but its very existence is encouraging. I will write more in my review of his main CCRT text. 


This book is a fine example of scientific rigor and inventiveness applied to psychoanalytic theory and psychotherapy as a whole.