JUDITH GUS TEICHHOLZ: Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns: A Comparative Study of Self and Relationship. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ, 1999, 320 pp. $47.50, ISBN 00-88163-260-0 (Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series Volume 18). Teicholz assumes that a has taken place in psychoanalysis, and she attempts to trace the origins of this to the work of Kohut and Loewald. She then outlines the views of a large group of moderate and radical so-called psychoanalysts, repeating at some length their enticing phrases and platitudes. She writes as if all of us agreed postmodernism has become the mainstream of psychoanalysis and represents a forward step, a in the field. There is no discussion of other views of what constitutes the mainstream of psychoanalysis today, a discipline which for many is still more or less informed by ego psychology, beginning with Freud's later writings and evolving through the work of Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann. We are told: Since analysts no longer see the central goal of psychoanalysis as involving a process of making the unconscious conscious, or turning id experience into ego, they also have no basis for claiming that their own unconscious experience and their subjectivity can be 'known' and controlled so that it has no unintended impact on the analyses that they conduct with their analysands. (p. 124) This evolves into: Long before self-expression was openly debated in psychoanalytic discourse, I sometimes found it invaluable to give myself freedom to engage authentically with my patients or express aspects of my unique experience that I hoped would foster emotional intimacy and trust or provide a useful experience of alterity in the analytic relationship. (p. 136) The term is never really defined in the book; it is just assumed that by spontaneously reacting and expressing those reactions to patients one is being more than by attempting to attain empathy and understanding of patients without intruding with one's own countertransferential interruptions. The premise is that these countertransferential interruptions and enactments are inevitable anyway, so why not admit to and discuss openly with the Patient. The first section of the book reviews some of the themes in the work of Kohut and Loewald, but the review is interspersed with quotations and discussion from the postmodern writing of such authors as Hoffman, Aron, Mitchell, and others. But because called all this a revolution does not mean that it was a revolution. In a curious non sequitur Teicholz writes, Through our recognition that there is no absolute knowledge, our theories teeter on the brink of losing whatever validity we formerly attributed to them (p. 30). If this were true, the entire science of mathematical calculus and all of the developments in mathematics since the time of Newton would teeter on a similar brink of losing their validity. The emphasis attributed to Mitchell and other postmoderns (p. 61) on direct, interpersonal engagement and authentic self-expression on the part of the analyst is never really explained or put to the clinical test. Is it more to somehow deliberately emphasize interpersonal engagement with a patient than to listen quietly with free-floating attention, trying to understand what the patient is attempting to communicate through derivatives of his or her unconscious processes? One person's authenticity can be another person's acting out! The same is true of her repetitive discussion of whether there is such a thing as an essential or central self within an individual or whether the entire concept of self is simply relative to cultural and developmental derivatives. …