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One of the ways that the Psychoanalytic Institute of New York University chose to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary was to hold an all-day symposium of two panels. The first of these, focusing on how theoretical perspectives inform clinical data, is the subject of this fine volume. Following the event, the panelists and presenter reconvened,
providing them the opportunity to reflect on the proceedings, reconsider viewpoints at variance from their own, and in the process integrate new material into their thinking. The result is a veritable raceme of material provided by presenter, panelists, audience, and thoughtful editors. Discerning editorial commentaries precede the presentation of clinical material (my only concern is that the point of view of some of the summaries might skew the impressions of inexperienced readers). There is also a thoughtful preface and introduction, and an appendix in which questions raised by the panelists are further considered.
The central focus of this volume is Claudia Lament's sensitive and detailed presentation of three consecutive sessions from work with a patient who at the time had been in analysis for two years and nine months. Lament was refreshingly open in expressing her concerns, frustrations, thinking about potential interventions, and personal history. The reader is thus made witness to a profound movement, development, and maturation in both patient and analyst.
For Lament, a significant obstacle in her use of defense analysis with this thirty-year-old male patient was his primitive nature, expressed in part by his terror of his childhood, and thus the reexperience of it, and his lack of basic trust, which he concealed “beneath an illusory wall of oneness and merger with the other” (p. 71). Thus, while the analyst tried to attend to conflicts and defenses, her patient was despairing of the use of language itself to communicate, and unable to trust in an elemental manner while struggling to hold on to an ambivalent relation