'This book is a one-volume condensation of a previously published three-volume set of workbooks. I have preserved the workbook format and have tried to select the most cogent clinical vignettes available in the original books to convey the essence of clinical (communicative) listening, formulating, intervening and validating.'This is a practice book in several senses; it stresses the details of sound clinical practice; it invites the reader to engage in exercises related to these practices as he or she goes through the volume; and it offers practice in techniques that are essential to sound psychotherapy. The hope is to make psychoanalytically orientated communicative technique real and accessible to the reader-practitioner in an active and immediately meaningful way.'- Dr Langs, from his Preface