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This is an invaluable book for practising analysts and therapists. John Klauber shares his personal struggle and experience in developing the identity of an analyst.
The title Difficulties in the Analytic Encounter indicates his willingness to penetrate the assumptions which too easily go unchallenged in our understanding of the work of analysis.
The author entered psychoanalytic training in 1948 and worked as a full-time analyst until his death in 1981. This book is a collection of papers showing the development of his thought and technique over thirty years. He was an eminent member of the Independent Group of the British Institute of Psychoanalysis.
The book is organised in three sections: Difficulties in the Therapeutic Situation, in the Technique, and in the Analyst. While he is able to be illuminating on the widest and most general themes such as ‘The Dual Use of Historical and Scientific Method in Psychoanalysis’, he is able above all to bring together the emotional and intellectual experience involved in the analytic encounter for both analyst and patient. He conveys the essential individual quality of each analytic session. I particularly enjoyed chapters such as Chapter Seven, ‘Formulating Interpretations in Clinical Psychoanalysis’. Here he describes the process which goes on in the analyst's mind as a ‘matching’ of what he is hearing from the patient with his own experience, and also with the knowledge of his patient's inner world. An interpretation is made out of this ‘matching’ process at the optimum moment. He is also illuminating about the subtle variations in phrasing by which an interpretation may become either traumatising or de-traumatising in the transference.
He confronts the present-day situation of the profession with candour, placing it in a historical perspective of the development of analytic thought since Freud. He also recognises the issues raised by its infiltration into twentieth-century culture, its very success in gaining recognition