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This good work seems to me part of a wider genre which seeks to give dual or multiple tendencies in human nature their due. It seeks at once to acknowledge and heal damage done by over-emphasizing critical analysis at the expense of imaginative intuition or vice versa. I think of an old book, Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield (1964), which shows the interplay of critical and intuitive capacities in poetry. In a way, Parsons does something similar for psychoanalysis.
There are wars in psychoanalysis not just between schools but between sensibilities. Some emphasize psychoanalysis as science, some as art, and there can be spiteful acrimony. Winnicott speaks for a democracy of voices and notes, for example, the difficulty that logical verbalizers and visual or auditory hallucinators have with one another (Winnicott 1989, p. 155). Parsons shows how damaging it can be to exclude precious capacities and how valuable it is to acknowledge their appearance in others. How we relate to who we are not plays an important role in discovering who we are. Often we find bits of who or what we did not become in those around us. In a way, we are carriers of lost or unborn aspects of one another, echoes of inner as well as outer diversity. Together we extend what we cannot live out alone.
Parsons asks what really matters in an analysis and shows that this can take many forms. He begins his book's journey by calling attention to Marion Milner's ‘answering activity’. Before Milner became an analyst in the technical sense, she discovered what she called an ‘answering activity’ in herself, a kind of I-yet-not-I or other in one's being, producing creative moments, the most precious moments of the day. Too often this ‘answering activity’ gets lost in training, although the latter exists to enhance it. Parsons values pulsebeats of unconscious life and shows how it is possible, even necessary, to evolve through complex relationships to unconscious processes. If one fails to find ways to work with