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I do believe that each human individual does have a sense of the wholeness of his self; that this is more than can be accounted for by your structural hypotheses; and that this self-experience can get dislocated or hidden or can even fail to personalize, if the early environmental care is too maladaptive. My work guides me to infer that most withdrawn states in life and regressive states in analysis carry the potentiality of a reaching out toward the self-experience that has become dissociated in the person and, if we can clinically provide adequate “holding,” then such self-experiences can materialize and help a patient to personalize and to restore his dissociated self to full participation in his day-to-day living.
This quotation from The Privacy of the Self conveys the breadth of view and the holistic spirit of the author. In this book, he repeatedly integrates the experiences of the psychoanalytic process. It is not a book of free-standing techniques or of isolated psychodynamic case studies. Rather, it is a book that evidences the integration of the psychoanalyst's understanding of himself and the discipline he practices with the life history and predicament of the person who seeks psychoanalytic help. Mr. Khan states in his preface: “Psychoanalysis is an extremely private discipline of sensibility and skill. The practice of psychoanalysis multiplies this privacy into a specialized relationship between two persons who through the very nature of their exclusivity with each other change each other.” Mr. Khan, who grew up in India and who is a Freudian psychoanalyst practicing in England, goes on to state in this same preface: “The first thing I wish to say about my work reported in these papers is that my patients have helped me become and personalize my potential thought, affectivity and effort into a way of life that I find deeply satisfying.”
That way of life, as Mr. Khan shows in this collection of twenty-one essays spanning twelve years, is a continuing exami