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In a recent moment of enjoyable dissociation, I pondered a Desert Island Discs scenario whereby I had to choose just two books from my professional library acquired over the past fifteen years. Which ones would they be?
One would be Cassandra's Daughter (Schwartz, 1999), to my mind a wonderfully informative exploration of the history of psychoanalysis. Through reading this book, I developed an interest in the development of our profession. Until recently, the choice of the second book would have been a dilemma - probably any one from ten. This conundrum was resolved when I recently read The Analysand's Tale.
So, what makes this book so fascinating? The Analysand's Tale explores instances in psychoanalytic history where both analyst and analysand have published descriptions of the analytic work. Bob Morley, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and couples therapist, additionally draws upon accounts by patients of their experience of therapy, including several instances where the individual has been in training analysis. He identifies differences in subjective experience of the therapeutic process between the therapist and patient. The fifteen cases explored in this book cover the whole of the twentieth century.
Morley's book questions whether the therapist's account can be viewed as an authentic version of the work. Where a patient's report of the therapeutic process has been published, should this version hold equal validity with that of the therapist? Should the therapist's view of what is therapeutic and based on ‘the medical model’ of treatment flowing from a diagnosis be seen as holding ultimate authority, whereas the patient's thoughts be regarded as largely irrelevant? Morley uses the phrase discordant agendas to describe the enactment between the therapeutic couple where power, firmly on the side of the therapist, is dissonant with the patient's self-system and results in an antitherapeutic battle between two subjectivities.