You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Hinshelwood is a prolific writer and we owe him a large debt of gratitude for his many papers and books, in particular two earlier volumes, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989), and Clinical Klein (1994). Both books are clear and lucid accounts of Kleinian and post-Kleinian developments in theory and clinical technique, and have been of enormous use in bringing what are difficult and sometimes arcane ideas to a wide audience.
This new book on countertransference is partly the summary of many previously published papers on the subject and shows some of the same impressive scholarly inclinations as his earlier work. It has a very helpful review of the key theoretical ideas as well as extensive accounts of the range of clinical phenomena related to countertransference. There is a good summary of the subject as it is described in the literature and how it is considered from within the different schools of psychoanalysis. However, it suffers from a surprising lack of an index.
The title Countertransference and Alive Moments with its subtitle Help or Hindrance perfectly captures the central issues that arise from the study of countertransference and which inform the contemporary practice of psychoanalysis as a clinical method. The ‘Alive Moments’ of the title refers to the heart of the matter. The essential emotional aspects of any contact between therapist and patient, that are fresh and immediate, are now understood to underpin any intervention that has a real mutative outcome. Hinshelwood argues very persuasively that it is around these alive moments that the claims of psychoanalysis as a method for psychic change, rests.
‘Help or Hindrance’ covers the controversies that still abound around the use and misuse of countertransference as a source of information about the transference. On this point it is interesting to compare Hinshelwood's detailed discussions with another recently published book of hitherto unpublished lectures and seminars that Klein herself gave to ca