You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This slim and deceptively simple book actually gives us much to think about. Its author, Jackie Gerrard, is an experienced psychotherapist who deftly blends ideas from the Balint-Winnicott school with the notions originated by Klein and her followers. Unlike many British contributors to our literature, she seems conversant with the work of North American analysts as well. It is not often that one encounters the names of Martin Bergmann, Dale Boesky, Judith Chused, Glen Gabbard, Theodore Jacobs and Thomas Ogden in the psychodynamic literature coming out of England. Gerrard's inclusiveness is refreshing. This is not merely a reflection of the breadth of her scholarship. Her reaching out to non-European literature reflects the earnest quality of her attempt to understand difficult and puzzling clinical situations. There is something “anagogic” (Silberer, 1914) at work here.
Actually, a spirit of this sort pervades the entire text of Gerrard's book. Her dedication is to follow the clinical process to its deepest ramifications regardless of the pathways that might lead one there: patient's words, patient's silences, patient's behavior, transference and counter-transference manifestations of all sorts, including reactions evoked by patient's absences. With ample clinical material to back up her ideas and to demonstrate her thinking in vivo, Gerrard tackles a variety of clinical dilemmas. Here are some of the issues that she takes up:
How to work with severely obsessional patients who display little freedom for analytic work? What kind of space and how much space is needed by the patient for optimal analytic work? What sort of approach is useful in working with patients with a great sense of entitlement? Is there a place for the analyst's feeling genuine love for his or her patient and for the latter to experience it? What does a patient's erratic attendance tell us besides that he or she is resistant to treatment?
I could extend this list, but the point has been made. Gerrar