Freedom to Experience: A Study of Psychological Change From a Psychoanalytic Point of View.

Abstract

This volume may be called a good bad book, or perhaps more appropriately a bad good book. Its content is interesting and timely. Dr. Wolstein describes the chief goal of psychoanalytic as reconstruction of the distorted self. book is an attempt to formulate a view of psychoanalysis as a general theory and practice of psychological change. To do this, he attempts to jettison the burdens of particular metapsychologies which he feels have restricted and hampered psychoanalysis in theory, in practice, and as science. He attempts to view psychoanalysis as something beyond the perspectives of id therapy or ego therapy, to root it rather in a unitary, multifocal series of fields of relatedness, that is to say, in the framework of observation, of experience, of transactions in a therapeutic field. The foundations of psychoanalysis . . . have outgrown the unidimensional concern with vicissitudes of the