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.
The American readers' initial reaction to On the Daily Work of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy may be the disorientation of touring unfamiliar territory with a guide who is part foreign, part native. Ian Miller is a New York interpersonal analyst transplanted to Dublin and Alistair Sweet is a training supervisor of psychotherapy based in Belfast. The therapeutic lingua franca in Ireland hails from British Object Relations. Having trained and practiced in New York, and now resident in Ireland, Miller, together with Sweet, navigate local, regional, and national currents in understanding the practice of psychoanalytic therapy across multiple languages of theory.
Beneath the ostensible modesty of their title, On the Daily Work of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is an ambitious enterprise the aim of which is no less than to provide clinicians with a pragmatic structure for understanding psychotherapeutic process. Its elements are observations of paranoid, schizoid, and depressive movements, as well as verbalizations made in the transitory shifts from one point in time to another. Though modest in title, its text is as challenging as Bion's – not surprisingly, since it is inspired by Bion's mathematical diction. On the Daily Work offers much but it is not to be taken by the faint-hearted reader.
The central idea is that psychodynamic psychotherapy pivots upon an ongoing, recursive clinical method. Of course, this is not new territory. In an earlier work, On Minding and Being Minded, Miller cites the writing of Giuseppe Civitarese, in articulating the same type of alternating therapeutic rhythm between absorption in the patient's presentation and the countertransferential transformations of intuitive reflection (Miller, 2015, p. 62). Miller and Sweet further explore this idea, with Bion as guide to the interpersonal-relational field. In this way, they utilize his abstract thinking not as a rigid universal, but as a conceptual structure to be customized in relation to each patient an