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The passage of time, and the ways that we and our patients deny, resist and defend against this, is a major theme in this fascinating collection of Pearl King's papers, written between 1951-2004. Alongside her psychoanalytic thinking she draws on reflections on time in poetry, especially in T.S. Eliot's work, from whose poem, ‘Burnt Norton’, she takes the title of this book. Psychoanalytic work occupies a paradoxical relationship with time, operating both in time and out of time. As Ken Robinson observes in his Introduction, ‘The psychoanalytic session is structured in time but represents a sort of playground out of time or, as Freud described it, “an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made”’ (p. 11).
The book is divided into three sections. The first section explores some important clinical issues including the use of the analyst's affective response to the patient in developing our understanding of the transference and countertransference in clinical practice, the interplay between psychoanalytic theory, trauma and developmental thinking, and the analytic attitude as a curative factor. This section starts with Pearl King's account of her analysis of a 4-year-old boy who came into treatment after witnessing his younger brother falling to his death from a window. Brett Kahr, in his Foreword, observes that her work with this young boy established King as a pioneer in the study of trauma in the 1950s, and also that this is one of the longest follow-up studies of a psychoanalytic treatment in the literature. King gives a very engaging account of her analysis of ‘Philip’ who was referred to her by Winnicott in 1951. Winnicott also supervised her on this case which was her first child analysis. She conveys how she entered into Philip's world, allowing him to use her like a toy, and enabling him to act out some of his destructiveness, as he was too traumatized and anxious to be able to play. When the anal