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Few can have missed the fact that the practice of analysis and analytic psychotherapy is currently under increasing public scrutiny. When the challenge comes from those outside the profession who confuse analysis with the proliferation of fringe therapies, who are not aware of the rigours of the training, who react from fear and defensiveness, it is experienced as a wearisome and irritating attack. Whilst the process of registration has required the profession internally to examine itself, this has focused primarily on matters of technique and training. But training for what? What is it that analysis is about? What are its aims? Is it effective? And by what criteria and methods can this be assessed? It is the nature of the beast that such questions are hard to answer, but this does not make them valueless. Indeed, it may be that it is in the tussle with such questions that the potential for exciting and creative development lies.
In this book Plaut faces these fundamental issues head on and aims ‘to add a dash of scientific rigour to the unbridled hermeneutics into which I see analysis drifting’ (p. 343). The result is a critical, sometimes uncomfortable book that confronts many of the assumptions of analysis as well as the investment we all have in our particular set of theories. He avoids a clear yes or no, true or false, of scientism and emphasises instead the concept of faith and its necessary corollary, doubt. Plaut is no dissenter. His own faith is evident yet he is trying to view the profession critically from within and use his doubts to define its limits and its strength. Alongside references to what he terms Bion's ‘desiderata’ (‘without memory or desire’) he explores the notion of change as an aim for analyst and patient and the analyst's belief that her or his theoretical approach will bring about that change. This is a faith that, unless conscious and tempered by doubt, can become blind. Yet even the more open-eyed faith of ‘non-controlling expectancy’ t