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This volume, a festschrift presented to H. Sydney Klein, comprises some 14 chapters written by his analysands, supervisees, colleagues and friends. In her brief introduction Joan Symington states that the book focuses on the multi-faceted nature of imprisoned pain, and its analytic transformation into pain which can be experienced and therefore worked with.
In the first chapter Anne Alvarez writes that it is still painful for her to read her notes on her first four years of work with 10-year-old Richard. He had become less psychotic but preoccupied with sadistic phantasies in relation to small animals, and had begun to act on them. Other colleagues and supervisors had suggested that this was not unusual for a previously psychotic child. But, when she went to Sydney Klein for supervision, he showed her how her patient was feeling attacked by some of her interpretations. This enabled her to understand that Richard's sadistic behaviour was based on identification with a persecutor. She modified her technique, and Richard ‘began to soften very quickly’ (p. 7). In the ensuing work, Richard became ‘far more collected and together and civilised’ (p. 7). It seems clear that Sydney Klein enabled his supervisee to be in touch with both her patient's and her own pain. This freed the therapist to do better clincal work. It also facilitated her on a journey of engaging with and absorbing the developing literature on projective identification and of evolving her own conceptualization of the ‘grammar’ of projective communications. She elaborates some of her ideas within her chapter. It is no surprise then to also be told that Sydney Klein, though trained as a Kleinian analyst, carved out an independent position within that school, and is also noted for his encouragement of attempts to think independently.
What of the rest of the book? Each chapter includes the author's own clinical material. They vary in focus, range and style. For example, Kate Barrows, in Chapter 5 relates her und