The premise of this book is to acqyaint other profesionals, primarily nurses, in the professional use of self in patient care and therapy, as developed at the Cassel Hospital in Britain, over the past seventy years. The chapters vary widely, ranging from a lofty and especially erudite chapter on the development of nursing theory (with some painfully true observations about US nursing practice), to some plain old ventilating about management's bottom-line practices. There is a chapter on the effects of race relations at that hospital from one author's perspective, and some case studies as one might typically find in a psychological handbook illustrating the author's point. The greatest difficulty was posed by the use of jargon that might be unfamiliar to practitioners in the United States. Some segments of the book are so challenging to decode that the effort is almost not worth it. The text seems to be a well-intentioned effort to document the efforts of a psychiatric behavioral institution in England to work with patients in a humanistic style that while genuine and effective, seems to have been undercut in recent years by the British bean-counters in much the way American medical practice has been changed by managed care.