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.
Nina Coltart does what her title alludes to: She presents us with a very lively baby who is all set to play now that the bath is over and the long, complex, and risky sorting out has been done. Our own readiness to play is all (!) we need With each new chapter I had the sense of someone speaking from the very heart of her experience, challenging me as I read to be clearer about my own thoughts and feelings, my own attitudes and beliefs. We join her at the stage in her life of partial retirement after more than 30 years of being a psychoanalyst (a time that has included more than 3000 consultations) and encounter her hardwon but happily shared wisdom.
Her capacity to remember where she started from, with all the sadness brought by increased awareness and abilities, is perhaps one of the reasons her book starts with the first paper she ever wrote, about the “Man with Two Mothers” who almost from the start “formed a very strong transference relationship,” which continued “with unabated intensity, often in the psychotic mode.” She feels she learned more from Mr. A than any other patient and advises that no therapist should pass up on at least one attempt to treat a patient with perversions, despite the tremendous difficulties, which she conveys with compassion for the patient as well as for herself
There is a greater sense of regret about her ignorance (because of the paucity of understanding generally about narcissistic disorders and psychosomatic disorders in the late sixties) that impeded the analyses of a “philosopher” and of the man with ulcerative colitis But as with everything else she writes about, she learned much, gave much, and passes the apparently unvarnished story along to us. Her indomitable curiosity and authentic concern must often have carried the day in those early years. There is a chapter called “Why Am I Here?” about such personal features that lead to the “vocation of psychotherapy” that include giftedness, belief in the power of the unconscious, st