It was delightful, therefore, to come upon Ira Steinman's wise, wonderful, lively, and engaging book, Treating the "Untreatable": Healing in the Realms of Madness. Steinman has dedicated himself to working psychodynamically with severely ill, schizophrenic, bipolar, and multiple-personality patients. His description of his work is clear, hard-headed, convincing, and inspirational. Treating the "Untreatable" is filled with rich clinical detail that is both fascinating and a distinct pleasure to read.

Steinman begins by observing that humane institutions that employ judiciously administered medications together with group and individual psychotherapy are not only few in number at present, but are rapidly disappearing. Even in the best of them, furthermore, the treating personnel do not generally delve deeply into the meaning of psychotic delusions and hallucinations. For many years, he has worked intensively on an outpatient basis with psychotic patients, a large number of whom previously spent years in one or more of those institutions without achieving a major change in their condition. His approach has revolved around the expectation that helping these patients understand the origin and functions of their psychotic symptoms is the most effective way of helping them become able to relinquish them.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Book Review Essay by Martin Silverman, M.D. Read review

This book is a beautiful forward development of Frieda Fromm-Reichman's seminal work. It's a creative confirmation of the virtues of psychodynamic psychotherapy in the hands of a virtuoso for the most disturbed patients many of us are reluctant to engage. For our residents who have little psychotherapy training and for seasoned clinicians, the book is an awakening!
Herbert S. Sacks, MD; Past-President, American Psychiatric Association

In bell clear, eloquent language, Ira Steinman shows his deep knowledge and compassion for the mentally ill and their problems. He never falls into the trap of thinking that mentally ill people are only that, and so he pleads for the understanding that will allow therapists to elicit the strength and health in their sickest patients. The word 'cure' is seldom attached to schizophrenia. Dr Steinman dares to use it and sometimes to prove it.
Joanne Greenberg, author of "I Never Promised you a Rose Garden" (under the pseudonym of Hannah Green).

TREATING the 'UNTREATABLE' demonstrates in a lucid and impressive way the possibilities for the intensive psychotherapy of severely ill psychiatric patients in a way that can lead to lasting benefit and restoration of full life functioning much beyond the kind of systematic management that can come with the use of psychoactive drugs (though of course such medications are indeed part of Dr Steinman's treatments in selected cases). This kind of treatment was once quite in vogue in psychiatric and psychoanalytic circles back in the mid-20th century associated then with the names of Frieda Fromm-Reichman, Margaret Sechehaye, Gertrud Schwing, Harry Stack Sullivan, and John Rosen, the best known of that generation, but has since been largely eclipsed by the rise of the use of psychoactive drugs, and this I feel has been a major curtailment of the restorative possibilities of these patients.

Ira Steinman's manuscript is an effort, and a substantial one, to redress this imbalance and to bring the intensive psychotherapy possibilities with these very ill patients back into the foreground. As such it can serve a very useful purpose for both the practitioner world and the world of current and potential patients out there.
Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D., Past President of the International Psychoanalytic Association

Alongside psychopharmacological intervention and the benefits it brings, the treatment of seriously disordered individuals requires that their delusional beliefs be addressed psychotherapeutically; otherwise, there is no significant and sustained symptom relief. Ira Steinman provides the most thoughtful, well articulated account available of how such treatment should be conducted, complete with captivating and instructive case examples. I wish we could have used his book in our residency program when I was Director of Training at the Department of Psychiatry, Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco. As Editor-in-Chief of 'The Psychoanalytic Quarterly' for ten years, and Program Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association for two terms, I can assure you that clinicians from various backgrounds and with all levels of experience will want to read TREATING the 'UNTREATABLE' and will find it enormously useful when they do.
Owen Renik, MD, Past Editor-in-Chief of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

I am very pleased to enthusiastically recommend TREATING the 'UNTREATABLE' by Ira Steinman. This is a most important book. I have no doubt that it will be controversial, but there are a good number of persons, of which I include myself, who are very familiar with the content of the kind of work that Ira Steinman is describing; although we might not all have the degree of success that he has, we do have similar successes and indeed there is a long history of such work from this approach. I think it very exciting to contemplate this kind of book, which will appeal to a wide audience and that focuses on immediate narratives of one person's clinical experiences in a psychodynamic psychotherapy as a treatment for schizophrenia.
Brian Martindale, MD; Past President of ISPS, the International Association for the Psychological Treatment of the Schizophrenias and other Psychoses

A brilliant story teller of journeys through Madness to Sanity; Ira Steinman has crafted a must read for anyone interested in the work of true psychological healing. These gripping clinical tales combine the artistry of Robert Lindner's "The Fifty Minute Hour" and the clinical brilliance and wisdom of the writings of Harold Searles and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Dr Stanley Prusiner, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, and Dr David Leof, Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association

I read TREATING the 'UNTREATABLE' with fascination, and with awe at your insight, your patience and pertinacity, and above all: your courage. Would anyone else ever have sufficient conviction to continue past scores of setbacks and resistances in the inner certainty that there would be success in the end - the God knows when - and for how long - end? You have confirmed me in my belief that you are essentially an artist, unique in your field, perhaps imitable, but never equalled: Artists are born, not made, not taught.
Wolfgang Lederer,M.D. Author of Dragons, Delinquents and Destiny, Fear of Women, and The Kiss of the Snow Queen