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To make attractive to the average person; make easily acceptable or understandable’, so the Dictionary defines the task of the popularizer. The popularizer, I would add, should successfully appeal to the intellect and intuition and stop short of spoon-feeding.
In spite of all the difficulties involved there is, I think, a resurgence of interest in Psychoanalysis, and a real desire to know what it can and cannot offer, what it does and does not claim… What I intend to do in this book is to explain to the general reader some of the ideas and discoveries which have arisen out of the work of analysts, particularly in England, over the last 50 years or so.
The question is: can we explain that which is experiental at its very core and essence without our readers throwing up barricades of fresh resistance, even if we may succeed in mitigating earlier ones? The writer tells us that her chief influences have been Klein, Bion, Segal and Rosenfeld. We know the fine stable of this mare. But Bion had a lot to say about Analysis as Transformation, concerning the quintessence of moving from K to O, where K is knowing about and O the truth we can become. The minute that we write ‘about’, the question instantly arises, do we write from K or O, for without the latter enzyme the former may not be digested.
Julia Segal's interest in Psychoanalysis, we are told, ‘has “been fed” by a personal analysis, by courses and seminars at the Tavistock…. and work supervision from several senior psychoanalysts.’ My own experience of her book was that it offers us a painstaking and comprehensive display of all this first rate nourishment, which at times moves just a little close to a regurgitation.
Certainly her material is well thought out and organized. There are, systematically, chapters on Phantasy and Perception, on Feelings, Relationships, Family Life and Work. There is a chapter on ‘Blame, Intention and Responsibility’ and