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As psychotherapists we face challenges on a daily basis. Often these deny categorization, since they occupy an interface between theory, technique and the personal capacities of the psychotherapist. These challenges however represent a potential, since the therapist is called upon to respond uniquely to the specificity of the relationship constructed with a patient. This book is about these dilemmas and represents the thoughts and practice of a variety of clinicians, all of whom adopt different theoretical and clinical approaches to their work.
In their introduction, the two editors, Helen Alfillé and Judy Cooper refer en passant to the increasing rigidity and institutionalism of the practice of psychoanalysis. Within this, though this is not a point the authors make, there is a fear of not practising correctly, and thereby presumably facing the censure of one's colleagues and one's supervisor. As they point out, there are no absolutes. Yet since the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is built on a relationship between two people, necessarily there need also be a space for the therapist's response to the dilemmas faced in the consulting room. It is this which forms the underlying theme in this book of readings.
Though the authors of these papers are in the main graduates of the British Association of Psychotherapists, they express a diverse and eclectic position towards the issues which they address. Some, such as the paper by Susan Lipshitz-Phillips on ‘Some thoughts on the use of the setting in psychoanalytic psychotherapy’, draw heavily on Freud and Klein yet, given the subject matter, I was surprised the author omitted the work of Winnicott (1990a, b). Similarly Simon Archer writing on ‘Violence and hostility from a sense of unconscious shame: shame in the countertransference’, where one would expect a reference to Kohut (1994) he draws primarily on drive-orientated theories. One wonders given this author's dependency on meta-theory how this comes to be tran