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I think this book is likely to receive mixed reactions; on the one hand it is a painstaking tour de force in the detail with which the author argues her case for the significance of the ‘site’ and the internalization of this in both psychotherapy and social work. Through providing multiple detailed clinical examples, which could be likened to process recordings, O'Neill carefully guides her reader through experiences of transition.
On the other hand, in framing her argument around the work of French psychoanalyst Jean-Luc Donnet and his emphasis on the ‘site’, O'Neill left this reader wondering why she had chosen this focus and what specifically it added to our understanding. The author states ‘Donnet designates the psychoanalytic setting in its broadest sense as the analytic “site”, composed of “elements” that can potentially be discovered and introjected, one by one, until the analysand's transformative discovery that he is in a functioning “analysing situation”. By this point, an analytic process is in train’ (Introduction, p. 1).
Is O'Neill in danger of underplaying the significance of other more familiar theoretical frameworks which also focus on the importance of the setting and the centrality of the relationship in establishing a therapeutic frame? For example, Winnicott's focus on the ‘holding environment’ (not mentioned), and Bion's writing on the ‘container/contained’ (only fleetingly referenced)? Both these theoretical perspectives, derived from hypotheses about early childhood, although differing in emphasis, seek to identify how therapeutic change is facilitated through experience. Reference is made to Winnicott's notion of ‘created/found’, linking it with Freud's papers on technique, referring, I believe, to free association. O'Neill writes: ‘In Donnet's view, the enunciation of this “fundamental rule” of psychoanalysis establishes the treatment as a tabula rasa that the patient will write on, a pristine terrain in which, as the patient sets foot in it f