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Isaiah Berlin (1953) famously divided thinkers and writers into hedgehogs or foxes (Archilochus: ‘a fox knows many things but a hedgehog one important thing’). By this reckoning, Patrick Casement is the quintessential hedgehog. He deploys a small number of simple ideas, which in their very simplicity are often embarrassingly overlooked by a psychoanalytic community that revels in complexity and esotericism. First, it is therapists' technical and ethical duty to put themselves into the shoes of their patients. That done, via trial identification, they must imaginatively listen to what they plan to say from the perspective of the recipient, and estimate its likely impact. This is Casement's internal supervision, the guiding principle of his method, gradually to be absorbed by his supervisees.
His second key concept derives from Winnicott's famous transmutation of the Kleinian notion of infantile ‘hate’ into hope: ‘hello object, I just destroyed you’. Casement is committed to the therapeutic benefit of the analysts' capacity to survive the ‘worst’ their patients can throw at them - rage, disappointment, resentment, disillusionment - while remaining receptively ‘there’, attentive, compassionate, and exploratory. A third guiding principle is what is conventionally seen as projective identification, but which Casement calls ‘communication by impact’ (p. 6). Through reflecting on her own patient-induced thoughts, feelings and actions (including ‘speech acts’, i.e. not just what is said, but when and how, and with what intent), the analyst finds clues to patients' inner worlds and unresolved traumata.
Alongside these conceptual bedrocks Casement advocates a number of more practical measures. Comments, clarifications and interpretations should be proffered in a tentative, half-interpretative, squiggle-like way rather than in dogmatic or ex cathedra fashion. A stance of non-certainty means that the analyst is open to correction, with the expectation that she is often likely to