In this brilliantly accessible RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES HANDBOOK, Hedges is now offering the reader a crisply streamlined overview of his four Relational Listening Perspectives, with a few modifications and subtle refinements. He makes a fascinating distinction that many psychotherapies in vogue today (e.g., positive psychology, supportive therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness meditation, and cognitive behavior therapy) focus on building up adaptive capacity by fostering neuroplasticity and the creation of new synaptic linkages in the brain, which of course is all well and good. But Hedges goes on to compare these psychotherapies to psychoanalytic therapy, which focuses first on breaking down the client’s limiting relational patterns – patterns that had been interfering with healthy relatedness – and then on working through these constricting patterns in the context of the therapy relationship. This continuously evolving analytic process involves negotiating the various transference / countertransference entanglements that will continuously emerge between client and therapist – such that there can be eventual transformation of underlying relational fears, revision of templates and scripts, and expansion of relational possibilities. (96 pp.)