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This is an exciting book. Before beginning an analysis of it, I want to give you my overall personal reactions. The book woke me up in much the same way as did Bion's readings. I'm not implying that Strenger is yet a Bion, but his ideas were an awakening, and seemed to clarify several nagging questions in my mind that I'd been tussling with: for example, that psychoanalytic ideas of what is a healthy outcome for treatment are so dreadfully middle-class. They lack the hideous passion of extremism and the fascinating perverse energy of deviance. Strenger deals with these issues and others, often raising more questions than answers.
The epilogue to the book captures Strenger's position: “The contemporary psychoanalytic clinician cannot rely on unquestioned normative models of human development and maturity in working with these patients” (p. 227). Instead, Strenger raises the question, “To what extent is individuality the realization of a pre-existing nature, and to what extent is it something like an artistic creation?” (p. 227). The book sensitively layers history and tradition, the current culture, early childhood, and the influence of parents and other critical object relationships on what he calls his patients' search for authorship, the process by which they create themselves. This authoring of individuality aided by therapy Strenger calls the “highly private ritualized search for the self” (p. 229). He severely eschews quick-fix brief therapy, whose facile “cures” he analogizes to religious conversion.
Comparing psychoanalysis to poetry, he points out that the lack of provable empirical hypotheses make the process of justification in our scientific climate virtually hopeless—and anyway, as with poetry, scientific analysis destroys the essence of psychoanalysis, much as if one