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In this volume Gail Reed presents a series of essays published at various times during her career, and divided into two parts: “The Clinical Uses of Understanding” and “The Clinical Uses of Comparative Understanding.” The unifying theme throughout is her position that contemporary
classical psychoanalytic theory “is the most potentially inclusive, integrative, comprehensive and the least doctrinaire of available theories, though also the most difficult to understand and utilize” (p. xv).
Modern classical theory posits a constructed hierarchy of personal childhood meanings and fantasies based on actual or fantasied experience and conflicts, leading to interpretation of present situations and relationships in terms of compromised unconscious expressions of past ones. Analysis allows the patient to discover this hierarchy and to modify the meanings attributed to present conflicts aid relationships in keeping with more mature, reality-based choices and perceptions instead of the automatic inferences and choices determined by the unconscious hierarchy. Surface content of the patient's associations represents and conceals significant unconscious meaning. The author demonstrates how this theoretical model applies to such topics as reconstruction, the transference and transference neurosis, and issues of meaning and narration in the psychoanalytic situation. These ideas are illustrated with detailed clinical vignettes.
“Any given element,” writes Reed, “may stand for another by virtue of temporal and spatial contiguity as well as of resemblance. An affect may defend against another. Classical theory allows us to understand how and why this may occur. It does not tell us what specifically to find. Classical theory gives us the principles by which meaning becomes disguised and distorted. It tells us that there will be an interaction of wishes, anxiety, and defense. It may even suggest a likely area of wish (e.g., oral or phallic), the kind of dangerous situation generally ima