Fundamentals of ISTDP, Volume 2: A Return to the Roots That Looks Forward

Some books you read. Others you work with. The second volume of Fundamentals of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy by Mikkel Reher-Langberg belongs to the second category — a thick, cloth-bound volume from the Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Library, published by Maison de Rien, that has sat on our desks and come up in supervision for weeks now.

Who the Author Is

Mikkel Reher-Langberg is a psychologist and the chair of the Danish Society for ISTDP. In 2018 he published a book on the Freudian concept of the ego, Faces of the Freudian ‘I’: The Structure of the Ego in Psychoanalysis, and he now co-runs a private practice, Emotion Center, in Copenhagen. That combination shows throughout this volume: the author thinks like a psychoanalytic theorist and writes like a clinician who sits across from a real patient every day.

A Psychoanalysis That Doesn’t Forget Its Roots

Many newer ISTDP textbooks leave the impression that the method grew out of nowhere, as a bundle of intervention techniques. Reher-Langberg does the opposite. He consistently traces where the concepts we use daily actually come from — resistance, transference, signal anxiety, ego structure. The reader sees that Davanloo didn’t break with Freud; he took Freud’s discoveries seriously enough to translate them into concrete, moment-to-moment work in the room.

This isn’t historical nostalgia, though. The book grows out of several years of training under John Rathauser, whose style of working stays close to Davanloo’s technique from around 1990; the author also notes he first learned the fundamentals of ISTDP through Jon Frederickson and Allan Abbass. Because of that, the volume carries something of a dialogue between different schools rather than a manifesto for just one of them.

Insight and Experience, Held Together

What struck us most is how the author holds theory and the experiential dimension together. ISTDP is a therapy in which what the patient lives through — in the body, in the relationship with the therapist, here and now — is central. Reher-Langberg doesn’t treat this as an add-on to understanding; he treats it as its condition. Insight without experience stays intellectualization; experience without understanding easily dissolves. The book shows how these two levels interweave in specific moments of a session.

In an interview for the Swedish ISTDP society, the author put it in a line that captures the spirit of the whole book well: we all use the same words as Davanloo, but the music is different. This volume is, in essence, a lesson in listening to that music.

Who Should Read This

We’d recommend this book above all to therapists. For those still in ISTDP training, it will help organize material that workshops often deliver quickly and in fragments. For experienced clinicians, it offers a chance to return to the fundamentals and see them freshly. For therapists from other psychodynamic traditions, it makes the case that ISTDP is a full member of the psychoanalytic tradition — not a distant cousin of it.

This isn’t a one-evening read. It’s a book for reading with a pencil, returning to, and bringing to supervision. For us, it’s one of the most important ISTDP publications of recent years.

Source for biographical details: interview, “Mikkel Reher-Langberg: We all use the same words as Davanloo, but the music is different,” istdpsweden.se.