This book is a monograph of the words and concepts gathered from many years of individual and family therapy. It is not an intellectual discussion about therapy, not about life. It is not written to be informative of new information. Rather it is intended to present the many points of view of psychotherapy where each person, even each interview, is unique, each with a changing viewpoint, the essence of dynamic psychotherapy. The elements are gleamed from his fifty years of professional care of patients, his teaching, and his work with staff. He is recognized as a Life Fellow by the American Psychiatric Association.

Our leaders offer promises of mood control. They talk of laws controlling our violence with no regard for its true nature, its true cause. They promise control of sexual judgment offering us dependable obligated sexuality in lieu of our changing judgment. They offer many sacraments for control of our depression, as they gain profit for relief of our symptoms.

Effective moods lead to whole active experience, with each new memory becoming an additional resource to create new and better experiences of life.

We seldom think of effective moods. We seldom see that our feelings come from our fantasy, from our thinking. We seldom notice that we control our attention, the base of our moods, the essence of our forming our fantasy, our creation of our moods, our planning our behavior deliberately. We seldom take responsibility for our pervasive moods, noticing how we repeat our fantasies over and over, blaming others for what alone we can control. Most of us live by our feelings, even projecting the source of our feelings onto others. We seldom note the flow of our awareness, the flow of memories. We seldom note that we select our attention to the myriad world of our motor sensory input.