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The encounters that are recorded in this book are the extended conversations that Anthony Molino had with each of five fellow analysts. In his Introduction he describes the aim of his book: ‘to provide, in a single collection, an overview of the lifework and thought of five of the most insightful and provocative thinkers in contemporary psychoanalysis’ (p. 2). They are all writers who have attracted Molino's interest and admiration and he sees them all as part of, or attracted to, the British Independent tradition, with Winnicott an important influence on them all. There are other links too: Phillips has edited Eigen, Bollas has promoted Coltart's writing in America. They all know and respect one another's work, Molino claims, and are thus genuinely ‘freely associated’.
Molino says that he was attempting an overview of the life and work of each of these writers. There are a number of books which review the work of a series of analytic writers and these are undoubtedly useful but can get very tedious, being endlessly descriptive. Molino's book would certainly fail if it was attempting to do overviews of that kind; what he does give us is far far better. Each conversation begins with Molino offering some thoughts he has had on the writer's recent work. The first few exchanges can be rather stilted and formal but, as both parties settle down, each conversation ranges off in different ways and in different directions. We all know that discourse between any two people is unique in its qualities and, although Molino provides ideas and topics, what we get from the subsequent self-expression of the subject is not an overview but rather a direct experience of what each writer is like, how they are and how they think, how truly individual each one is. This book is full of liveliness as each person, in his or her own unique way provides, as Molino says, ‘together with intellectual nourishment, inexhaustible sources of delight’ (p. 3). This sense of delight would be no less true