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Klauber, John (1981) Difficulties in the Analytic Encounter. New York: Jason Aronson.
JOHN KLAUBER, THEN PRESIDENT OF THE BRITISH PSYCHOANALYTICAL Association, died at 64 in August, 1981, and the world psychoanalytic community lost a seminal mind. Author of Difficulties in the Analytic Encounter (Klauber, 1981), Klauber was trained as a historian, an intelligence officer in the British Army and, later, in both Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis. Gazing from several theoretical perspectives, "organizing and articulating his self-consciousness in his own erudite way" (Feiner, 1981), he was an elegant scholar with a command of the written language rare among his professional peers. Using the lexicon of Freud, he shares in the book under examination here, the details of his participation in the analytic encounter, and opens to scrutiny analysts' actual work (Witenberg, 1981). His lucid prose is infiltrated with object relations psychology, general systems theory, interpersonalist constructs and sometimes a dash of existentialism and religion. Far too sophisticated and authentically polymathic to attack or to preach, Klauber was content simply to inform, setting forth case material to illustrate and illuminate point after point. He was the consumate teacher-artist, those inspirers of which there are all too few nowadays.
Difficulties in the Analytic Encounter is a collection of a dozen of his papers, published during the past 15 years, now organized into one unified work, with brief chapter introductions which ensure a smooth flow of ideas. These little pieces are so disarmingly understated and modest that they temporarily spare the reader from becoming too dazzled by the author's brilliance, for Klauber interpreting individual psychodynamics, identifying transference