Postscript: ‘I Was so Much Older Then …’

If I were sent this article to review by the BJP today I suspect I would sit on the fence about whether or not to recommend publication. Following conventional etiquette I would start by finding a few things about it to praise: quite interesting in a slightly off-beat way, good discussion of the poem, not badly written although occasionally somewhat pompous especially in the opening page, clinical examples competently handled (but has he got written permission to publish these details?).

Then I would start to pull it apart. What exactly is the author trying to say and where precisely is he (assuming it is a he as BJP articles are, of course, anonymized) coming from? Is he a middle-grouper, a Jungian, an interpersonalist, or what? Why all this emphasis on Rycroft, a somewhat marginal figure? Why not talk about psychotherapeutic process in its own terms, without having to muddy the waters by bringing in poetry for goodness' sake - most people hate or ignore the stuff anyway? And all this psychotherapy/neurology stuff at the end seems rather out of date - hasn't he heard of Solms (1997), Schore (2003), Gerhardt (2004) et al.?

Well, what was I trying to say, and where was I coming from? At one level the latter is fairly straightforward: I was (literally) coming from therapy with Charles Rycroft, and wanting to fly the Rycroftian flag (see Pearson 2004) - my post-therapy positive transference/idealization at that stage still somewhat unresolved. At another, I was simply following my own personal form of eclecticism and wanting to see if one could think about psychotherapy in the same sort of terms as poetry. The question remains - why should one have wanted to do that?

I suppose my answer would be that the paper was an early attempt to tackle a problem which I continue to see as largely unresolved: the huge discrepancy between psychoanalytic theory and what actually goes on in the consulting room between patient and therapist. And, in a Rycroftian way, I think there is an i