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." - Psychologist-Psychoanalyst: Division 39 Newsletter

"Roy Schafer is right (in his laudatory blurb about this book): it is "a remarkable achievement." Kaner and Prelinger (both Yale) reach an implicit rapprochement between person-centered and dynamic psychotherapy. The older psychoanalytic dictums—interpret dreams, resistances, transference, and defenses, and nothing else—have been replaced. his marvelous update in dynamic psychotherapy is a fine addition to the literature. Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." - CHOICE

"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 Division would 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 concerns of 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." - Psychologist-Psychoanalyst: Division 39 Newsletter

"Beginning students should welcome and profit richly from this illuminating discussion of the basics of psychodynamic psychotherapy." - Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic: A Journal for the Mental Health Professions, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Fall 2007)