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As in his earlier book Learning from the Patient published in 1985, Casement invites us to identify with him and with his patient as they work together analytically, and to reflect on the separate and connected experience of each. He shows how, by practising ‘trial identification’ with the patient and his inner world, he is enabled as therapist to respond in ways which provide space and time for the patient's emotional experience to develop meaning and connect with the rest of his life.
Casement is already well known to a wide public in the helping professions for his gift in conveying complex human interaction in simple English, illustrated with precisely selected and focused clinical material, and his new book is in the same style. He also discusses the approach to the psychotic, what is therapeutic in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and training: implicitly, as well as explicitly, he provokes thinking about these issues.
In Chapter 3, ‘A child leads the way’, the meaning of analytic space and process is beautifully illuminated by an account of a child therapy. Both patient and therapist have their anxieties, the child pushing for growth and afraid of discovering what she needs to know; while Casement, as a young and as yet unqualified therapist, is afraid of trespassing professionally; he had been engaged as a remedial tutor. Yet the evidence is there that he was unconsciously feeling and responding, even as he delayed, to the child's fears and growing readiness to use the freedom of the analytic space which she prompted him to negotiate with her mother. This therapy is an achievement: that its effectiveness was long-lasting is confirmed by the Follow-Up. The Discussion, therefore, at the end of the chapter has a discordant note of apology and challenge, as if addressed to some ‘classical’ judge dispensing qualifications from the heights of Olympus or Sinai, and blind to the internal qualifications manifested in the young Casement.
The background presence of a dog