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This refreshing, unusual and stimulating book is aimed at those new to psychotherapy and at present-day trainees (so long as their training is in
psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapy). Its pages reveal the journey of a well-seasoned traveller of both the internal and external world, who generously shares her humanity, humour and dedication. Nina Coltart's conversational and untheoretical style invites you to take a friendly stroll. Perhaps this is why areas of controversy are only obliquely referred to.
Most people who have trained with one of the London analytic psychotherapy organisations within the last couple of decades will certainly know or know of Dr Coltart. She has become very much a mother/grandmother figure to generations of psychotherapists whom she advised, supervised, encouraged, referred on to training therapists and referred patients to. A common sense approach has typified her stance and permeates the pages of this book.
In the Introduction Nina Coltart distinguishes between survival ‘in its rawest bleakest sense’ and survival in its positive sense (p. 1):
At the heart of the matter lies the idea of enjoyment: enjoyment of the experience which is being survived, and enjoyment of the ways in which it enriches the whole of the life of the survivor, whether working or relaxing, or simply being oneself.
This latter use of the word survival in relation to enjoyment will resonate with many of us familiar with the work of Winnicott, who refers to the survival of the object as being of paramount importance in the patient/analyst relationship. What the reader will find here is advice on how the therapist must provide for herself. This is what is refreshing and unusual. Instead of a treatise on what we must do for our patients the implication throughout is that we can be nothing for our patients if we do not tend to our own needs and desires. It is true that the emphasis in all training organisations is the trainee's personal therapy, but it is as if that