Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1996, Vol 41(9), 914–915. The reviewer notes that in this book (see record 1995-98166-000), Lawrence Josephs provides a balanced, integrative, and sophisticated look at a tension that has run throughout analytic thought: that between staying empathically engaged with the patient and dealing interpretively with deeper issues that allow a treatment to move toward a goal of character change. Beginning with Freud and moving through the approaches of classical analysis, ego psychology, interpersonal theory, self psychology, and object relations, he deftly treats the differing perspectives not as competing and irreconcilable points of view but as differing layers of a clinical process he believes can benefit from the contributions of all. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)