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In reading and thinking about Janet Sayers' new book, I found myself remembering other books that had been important to me when I started reading Freud and learning about psychoanalysis. One of the most useful and accessible ones was Neville Symington's The Analytic Experience (1986), based on his lectures at the Tavistock, in which he introduced his readers to the whole psychoanalytic tradition, as viewed from a British perspective, from Freud through to Klein, Bion, Winnicott and others. Symington discussed the theories of these founding analysts, including his own responses and criticisms, and numerous clinical examples, producing a very readable book, both informative and personal. Later on, I read Freud's Models of the Mind by Joseph Sandler et al. (1997), which charted the development of Freud's thinking
about the mind, and clinical practice, with clarity and rigour, describing three main phases in his work: firstly, the affect-trauma frame of reference, then the topographical and structural models. The book was largely aimed at psychotherapy trainees and practitioners within the psychoanalytic tradition, and is a useful resource for teaching about Freud. Jonathan Lear's Freud (2005) was presented as an introduction to Freud as philosopher, and so was somewhat less of a general introductory text, although a valuable and instructive read, with an interesting perspective. It contains what for me was a most memorable idea, namely Lear's suggestion that Freud's 1914 paper, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’ was his ‘most significant article’, and that ‘if all of his works were somehow lost except for this one, we would be able to reconstruct what is valuable in psychoanalysis’ (Lear, 2005, pp. 133-4). Although Richard Wollheim's book, Freud (second edition, 1991), published in the Fontana Modern Masters series, could be seen as an introduction, it is also quite a demanding text and not an easy read for anyone coming new to Freud's work.
I was surprised