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The name if not the person of Nina Coltart will be familiar to many readers of this journal. As the blurb correctly says, she is a distinguished member of the Independent Group within the British Psychoanalytical Society, who has at various times been Vice-President of the Society and Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. She is also well known as a speaker, a supervisor, a source of referrals not only from the London Clinic but also from her private consulting practice, and for her encouragement of psychotherapy training centres, notably the Arbours Association. Slouching Towards Bethelehem is, we are told, her first collection of writings, the implication being that there will be more to come.
As the Independent Group is not a formal school of psycho-analysis but rather a collection of, hopefully, independent-minded eclectic analysts, Dr Coltart's position within it demands further definition. The analysts of the preceding generation who seem to have influenced her most are Winnicott, Bion, Balint and Laing; the contemporary analysts she quotes most often are Christopher Bollas and Neville Symington. Rather surprisingly, in view of the fact that she is insistent that psychoanalysis is a moral not a natural science and that religion is not just a neurotic's illusion, she is at pains to emphasise her indebtedness to Sigmund Freud; she appears to have a particular affection for the tripartite, structural conception of the personality that he developed in the 1920s, but it is noticeable that she eschews the phrase ‘psychic apparatus’, and, I gather, conceives of the tripartite, psychic structure as a convenient metaphor and not as an explanatory hypothesis.
However, Dr Coltart is not, and would not, I think, claim to be, a theoretician. The papers included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem are not scientific contributions to the psychopathology of specific neuroses but, rather, meditations on what sort of an activity psychoanalysing is, on what attitude an analy