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Many patients entertain the thought that they will make detailed notes after each session of their psychoanalysis, and probably few persist for more than a short time. Harry Guntrip, however, really did: he kept a detailed record of both his analyses, with Fairbairn and Winnicott, and when he was an old man, and they were both dead, he wrote them up in his lively and energetic style in a paper which he published in the International Review of Psychoanalysis (Guntrip, 1975). Charitable, forthright, and carefully avoiding superiority, it gives a vivid picture of these two pioneers at work, Fairbairn the austere, aristocratic purveyor of relentlessly intellectual interpretations, Winnicott informal and humorous, speaking of Guntrip's babyhood experience with rather astonishing certainty
In the 1960s and 1970s, Guntrip was well known as a writer on ‘schizoid’ phenomena, and his name was often bracketed with that of Fairbairn. He lived in Leeds, worked as a psychoanalyst but never formally trained and was not a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society so, although in one sense well-known, he remained somewhat peripheral. When I first encountered the psychoanalytic scene in the 1970s, he was mainly viewed, I think, as a sort of accessible spokesman for Fairbairn's ideas. He became critical of Fairbairn's technique but it is not unfair to see him in that light: it was Fairbairn's great insight that beneath ‘depressive’ symptoms there is often ‘schizoid’ pathology, which both contributed crucially to the development of Melanie Klein's thought and also became Guntrip's central message.
In the present book, Trevor Dobbs, a training analyst in California, has revisited Guntrip's career with a view to putting him in the context of his religious background. The comparison of psychoanalytic schools with religious movements has often been made, and it is certainly suggestive that all these pioneers of the British Psychoanalytical Society's ‘Independent’ group came from Christi