Preface

In my contribution to a recent volume paying tribute to Nina Coltart (Rudnytsky and Preston 2011), I proposed that the most important question to ask oneself in reading an analytic author is whether one would want to be in treatment with that person. It is a measure of my esteem for James McLaughlin that I now place him alongside Coltart in my private pantheon as the contemporary with whom I would most have wanted to be in analysis, secure in the belief that I would have had a genuinely therapeutic experience.

As with Coltart, who died in 1997, my love for McLaughlin derives entirely from reading his work, as I regret that I did not meet him before his death in 2006. And just as the volume I edited with Gillian Preston, Coltart's sister, was the first collective stock-taking and celebration of this most independent of the British Independents, so this issue of American Imago is the first time that McLaughlin's achievement has been comprehensively scrutinized and given its due. I make no bones about my conviction that McLaughlin, like Coltart, was one of the greatest—if most undervalued—analysts of the twentieth century, and I hope my labors will help to make what may still be well-kept secrets more widely shared.

If I think of McLaughlin as an “American Coltart,” it is first and foremost because of the rare eloquence of his writing, which bears comparison with that of “the Jane Austen of psychoanalysis,” as I have called Coltart. And then there is the unsparing honesty of their self-revelations as each neared the end of his or her life—Coltart's in her interview with Anthony Molino (1997), and McLaughlin's in the outpourings inspired by William Cornell, his editorial muse for The Healer's Bent (2006)—allowing us to see how the analyzing instruments of both were ground on the wheels of their early losses and traumatic histories. Both were steeped in classical analysis but ended up as radicals, distancing themselves from the establishments