You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book contains two distinct strands. In the first instance it attempts to reformulate psychoanalytic theory in light of recent work on the interactional dynamics of the psychoanalytic situation in the tradition of Langs, Gill and in this country Casement. Dorpat and Miller argue that there are no such things as unconscious phantasy/memory constellations, and that analysts who formulate interpretations in such terms are barking up the wrong tree. The authors state that the unconscious part of the mind engages in a process of analysing the meaning of here-and-now situations, which they call ‘meaning analysis’. To their great credit, Dorpat and Miller make the point that one cannot blithely incorporate unconscious meaning analysis into a traditional psychoanalytic model alongside transference, unconscious phantasy, and so on. One must make a choice. British analysts such as Joseph, Little and Casement have, in my opinion, fudged this issue.
The second strand of the book is to reconceptualise psychoanalytic clinical concepts in the light of notions borrowed from cognitive psychology. Although this is an honourable attempt to bring psychoanalysis into the twentieth century, the way that the authors pursue it sometimes blunts the radical edge of the book. For example, it seems at first that Dorpat and Miller are going to throw out the concept of transference entirely, but in the end they just reconceptualise it along cognitive psychological lines. By the same token, the role played by unconscious phantasy in the traditional model is occupied by 'unconscious pathogenic belief (a term borrowed from Weiss and Sampson) in the new theory. The two concepts seem to me to be interchangeable for all practical purposes.
The strongest aspect of this book is the attempt to frame a more adequate psychological theory to underpin psychoanalytic clinical practice. I must confess to strong reservations about how the authors pursue their aim. In particular, I am concerned that there is l