EDA GOLDSTEIN: When the Bubble Bursts: Clinical Perspectives on Midlife Issues. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2005, 239 pp., $49.95, ISBN 0-881163-348-8. This book deals with the midlife years, their special issues, and the distinctive problems that patients over age 50 pose for psychotherapists. Using both developmental and psychotherapeutic frameworks, Goldstein methodically covers the psychoanalytic literature on the subject. She leans heavily on the work of others, and after reviewing the long-standing debate between Kernberg and Kohut, she adopts a basically Kohutian self-psychological point of view, both theoretically and in practice. The book is clearly written and quite easy to follow. At times it borders on the simplistic so that it's difficult to identify its primary audience. Experienced clinicians could benefit from the collation of diverse materials on this important subject and students likely would find this a useful introductory text. As a psychoanalyst, I did, however, have a strong reaction to the book's great abundance of clinical material, most of which was evidently drawn from recorded psychotherapy sessions. The therapeutic work is based on the supposedly healing properties of therapists' surface understanding of, and empathie responses to, their patients' material, dilemmas, and conflicts. The sessions are laced with what is claimed to be therapists' judicious use of direct advice; explications of the evident implications of a patient's communications, behaviors and problems; selected personal self-revelations by the therapist (e.g., that the therapist had lost a homosexual partner but had found a replacement); and other interventions said to be supportive and curative. Even though it can be argued that no book is representative of how psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists work today-multiple theories and practices of psychoanalysis are well known-I took this book as a model of where psychoanalysis stands today. Thus, the comments that follow could be made about any current psychoanalytic text, an effort that I have made regarding other prominent psychoanalytic writings in my most recent books (Langs, R. (2004). Fundamentals of Adaptive Psychotherapy and Counselling. London: Palgrave-Macmillan; Langs, R. (in press). Love and Death in Psychotherapy. London: Palgrave-Macmillan). The clinical substance of this book reflects the current psychoanalytic tendency to believe and intervene in ways that reflect either the conviction that there is no unconscious component to human emotional suffering and emotionally charged communications, or that the unconscious component is to be found solely in the transparent, theory-guided implications ascribed by therapists to their patients' material-implications of which their patients seemingly are unaware. A word is a word, a sentence a sentence, a thought a thought. There is no sense of symbolic, or more critically, encoded meaning in the communications of either patients or therapists. There are no dreams to decipher, no ground rules or framework to explore and grapple with as these affect the therapeutic couple and the patient's psychotherapy. There is no unconscious flow of communications between patient and therapist, no unconscious realm of experience as it affects emotional maladaptations and human creativity, and there is nothing of substance beyond the direct meanings of what is said and done by both patients and their therapists. …