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For many years Betty Joseph has led a case discussion group made up of younger psychoanalysts that has created waves of influence in relation to her ideas of micro-analysis of process together with her development of Melanie Klein's notion of the ‘total transference situation’. The Workshop is based on the assumption that most of the analyst's countertransference is unconscious causing him to be pulled into enactments with the patient, entanglements that are devilishly difficult to step back from and understand, requiring a ‘third’ to be involved. The Workshop provides just this needed third position of felt observation, and over the years the participants have learned to trust each other and to become familiar with each other's strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies as they decipher the unconscious relationships going on in their consulting rooms. The papers of this book represent a culmination of the techniques and insights that have evolved since the Workshop's beginning in 1962.
Joseph's enquiry, in particular, has been into those patients whose genuine emotional states are, in the words of one of her seminal papers, ‘difficult to reach’, patients who are more often encountered in clinical practice than one might expect. These are patients whose analyses either appear to be moving along in a co-operative, unconflicted way but without real change, or else present as more overtly stuck and inaccessible to analytic improvement, patients who fear being emotionally unsettled or knocked off balance by contact with a turbulent unconscious, so that they convert the analysis into a haven for maintaining their psychic equilibrium. Joseph emphasizes the antidote: immediate, alive, present emotional experience in the session through the re-owning of projective identifications. These patients ‘act on us to feel things’, the vehicle of projection, to pull us into their defensive systems or into acting out desired relationships, forestalling psychic change.
The book begins wit