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Deceptively small, this dense, informative and carefully written book has the dual aims of contrasting the work of Jung and Searles and of forming a unified theory of psychotherapy from their ideas.
The writer, himself a Jungian analyst, identifies Searles as the psychoanalyst who has most to offer to analytical psychology. The writings of Jung and Searles are then explored as complementary in tension and as dissonant. The centre of focus is initially on their two theoretical positions and then on the areas of psychopathology, psychotherapy and lastly on the therapist him/herself.
Both theorists are shown to have drawn from their own inner world experiences, having brushed closely enough with psychosis to allow them to see pathology as potential and to appreciate the importance of the therapist's personality in defining the limits of therapy. They are seen as in agreement on the fundamentally unconscious quality of human nature, the need not only to see the presenting individual in depth, but in a scope that can link the ancestral with the teleological: for Jung, a dimension in his exploration of the numinous, for Searles, the backdrop of psychotherapy and clinical experience.
Sedgwick looks at the pluralistic phenomenology of both theorists in their peopling of the unconscious. He compares Jung's concept of complexes (which can be personified) with Searles' ‘multiple identity processes’. Again the key difference is seen in Jung's archetypal versus Searles' personalistic view of their sources. Both forsake the medical model and see psychopathology in terms of the frequent interference of multiple inner selves and the failure of consciousness to understand them, leaving the individual persistently unconscious of him/herself. There is a difference in how the painful or conflictual events which give rise to defensively unassimilated emotional reactions or pathogenic introjects are seen as originating. For Searles they arise within the context of the immediate family, for