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This is the first in a series of books exploring important and challenging issues confronting those working therapeutically in diverse settings. Drawing on the wide-ranging experience of members of the London Centre for Psychotherapy, the first volume concentrates on a number of new challenges to the classical psychoanalytic skills and techniques developed for intensive (three or more times per week) psychotherapeutic work. A forthcoming volume will consider contemporary ideas enriching psychoanalysis today. In light of this insightful, useful, first contribution, future volumes will be eagerly awaited by students and experienced practitioners alike.
As the crisis in modern-day mental health care provision deepens, there are many situations in which intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy cannot be provided, is not wanted, or is not appropriate. (This is not to say it is neither needed, wanted, nor appropriate in a better world.) Each of the five chapters in this book seeks to address what is to be done in such circumstances, without compromising the professional integrity of practitioners often trained to respond solely within traditional models, who are perhaps made anxious when working outside such comforting ‘certainties’. Each chapter is informed by a spirit of modest, but thoroughly rigorous, enquiry:
We believe that by expressing our fears and doubts as well as our achievements we are not only describing our individual experiences but also are conveying something of the culture of the London Centre for Psychotherapy, which we value as a nurturing professional environment. (p. ix)
Josephine Klein's essay ‘When we counsel, analyse, therap’ establishes the ethical and theoretical framework for discussion in the entire book. She begins by pointing out that what the patient really requires is difficult in a first assessment to decide, and is rarely ever discussed, since practitioners tend to see what they have been taught to see, in accord with whatever training organ