The Modern Kleinian Approach to Psychoanalytic Technique by Robert Waska Lanham, md:  Jason Aronson, 2010,  165 pp.

It has been said that every writer only ever writes one story. Robert Waska's new book, his fourth to be published, is an extension of previous books and papers, including a paper in this journal (Waska, 2008). This book is

both a primer on current Kleinian technique and a political argument for broadening the term psychoanalysis to include psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalytic couple therapy. In this endeavour the concept of analytic contact (Waska, 2006) becomes the theoretical bridge between his clinical and political concerns. What, then, does Waska mean by analytic contact and what are, first, the implications regarding technique, and second, the political implications regarding what constitutes psychoanalysis?

Waska works very much in the tradition of the British object relations school. His concept of analytic contact owes much to Betty Joseph's (1985) idea of analyzing the total transference, and her emphasis on making contact with the infantile aspects of the patient. This is how the author describes his analytic stance: “The analyst works to make contact with the patient's core unconscious phantasies and object relational conflicts through the use of transference, countertransference, interpretation and the moment-to-moment exploration of the dynamics of projective identification” (p. 77). Analytic contact fluctuates throughout the session and can be sought or avoided by the analyst. If the analyst manages to string together many moments of analytic contact with a patient, an enduring analytic process is said to be in place. In this fashion, the repetition of the moment-to-moment phenomenon of analytic contact adds up to the more enduring phenomenon of a psychoanalytic process. A qualitative leap is assumed. What exactly this qualitative leap entails both interpersonally in the analytic dyad, and intrapsychically in the patient's mind, is not spelled out, yet well worth asking.

Ogden (1993) discusses a similar question when he asks how exactly th