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This is an ambitious and always thought-provoking book that goes far beyond what the subtitle How to Develop as a Psychoanalytic Practitioner suggests, and it has more than a hint of a moral agenda. In many ways it speaks to two audiences which Spurling addresses as two distinct groups with different degrees of clinical experience. However, it might equally address one group who are in two alternating states of mind; namely one state of mind where confidence and complacent certainty reigns and the other where doubt and helplessness has dominion. Hopefully whether one belongs to the experienced group of clinicians Spurling is principally addressing or the less experienced group, from time to time we all have the conviction that we are mere beginners and this is accompanied by moments of serious self-doubt. This is to be welcomed, as self-doubt when it is not under the dominance of an ego-destructive super ego can inoculate us periodically from the ever present dangers of omnipotence and omniscience.
Spurling is alert to the twin dangers of both debilitating destructive self-doubt and the routine autopilot use of psychoanalytic cliches. He devotes a good deal of useful space to clearly explicating the process and journey involved in the effort to gain experience by the qualified yet relative beginner in psychotherapy. He sympathetically describes the struggles of those who have established a bit of a foothold in analytic theory and practice, and have made some slow, painful progress towards acquiring a modicum of psychotherapeutic skill. Yet at the same time he simultaneously takes on and challenges many of the familiar concepts, shibboleths and bits of received wisdoms that are the currency of all of us, including the more senior.
This approach will bring deserved comfort to the self-doubters, whether they be in the experienced senior group or not, and hopefully it will stimulate critical self-examination and self-reflection among the more sophisticated and more confid