issn 0362-4021 © 2013 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 38, No. 4, Winter 2014 367 1 Correspondence should be addressed to Brunhild Kring, MD, Department of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016. E-mail: brunhild. kring@nyumc.org. Book Review Finding the Fear: A Couple Therapy Training Workshop. By Lee D. Kassan. Privately published by Lee D. Kassan, 2014, 148 pp. http://www.leekassan.com/ Reviewed by Brunhild Kring1 and Susan Mahler Lee Kassan is on an educational mission: He wants individual and group psychotherapists also to try their hand at couple therapy. Of course, he knows that treating couples is not for the faint of heart. It can be one of the most challenging of the psychotherapeutic modalities. Therapists often avoid couples at the height of conflict and emotional activation and instead refer them to marriage counselors or family and sex therapists. The author is trying to remedy this state of affairs by helping clinicians transcend their cautious attitude toward conflict-prone couples. To teach his technique, he filmed one of his workshops and published it as a two-DVD set. The accompanying book contains the transcripts of the workshop, the analysis of his interventions, and the discussion with the workshop participants. Kassan introduces the workshop session by making a disclaimer about “theory.” He feels that clinicians will be able to be of therapeutic assistance to couples by employing his treatment technique, which he has honed over 30 years of professional experience. He suggests that worrying “too much about theory” can be a distraction. Of course, in our field, we rely on theory, and Kassan is not really atheoretical. He briefly acknowledges his indebtedness to attachment theory and provides a very succinct summary and diagram by which to differentiate the four basic attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Maybe he considers attachment theory to be so basic as to be self-evident and not in need of acknowledgment as a “theory.” In a previous paper (Pearl & Kassan, 2012), he reviews the researchers and 368 kring and mahler clinicians who influenced him the most and demonstrates how deeply he is aware of and grounded in theoretical schools of thought. But for the sake of simplification and teaching, he has distilled his insights into six concise “Rules of Engagement” (p. 13), which we briefly summarize. One of his basic dictums is “I,” not “you,” because he believes that talking about oneself is less likely to make the partner defensive. “No attacking, defending, or withdrawing ,” he instructs the spouses. These principles are inspired by Gottman’s (1994) four horsemen of the apocalypse. Better to ask “no questions” because, in Kassan’s experience, questions are often veiled criticisms. Most important, the partners are encouraged to “express the fears.” Eliciting the unexpressed anxieties and insecurities often clarifies attachment issues, such as worrying that the other person will be emotionally too close or too distant. It would be helpful if intimate partners would “explain the meaning”; no doubt the litany of trivial day-to-day complaints stands for something with a deeper meaning, often unbeknownst to the aggrieved person himself or herself. Last but not least, Kassan coaches everyone to express “feelings, not facts.” Reflecting about one’s emotional reaction rather than squabbling about minutiae of events helps the couple contain aggression. After teaching couples these basic psychological concepts, and establishing the ground rules of behavior in the session, he makes two interventions that are different from how most therapists work and that are counterintuitive at first sight: He instructs the couple to sit in two different swivel chairs facing each other, rather than sitting on a couch next to each other. Furthermore, he skips taking a history of the couple’s past relationship or the psychological history of each spouse. These two decisions influence the dynamics of the session profoundly. With his specific seating arrangement, Kassan forces the couple to look at each other throughout the session and speak directly to each other, rather than inducing the therapist to take sides and act as the referee. He focuses on the couple’s relationship and communication style, rather than analyzing their individual pathologies. He also...