Reflections on my Experience of Psychoanalysis with Guntrip

IN ADDITION TO ANY GENERAL INTEREST inherent in an account of subjective experience, I hope that this paper may be of value in appraising the relative effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy in dealing with obstinate human emotional disturbances. In addition to my reflections on the analysis itself, I quote from a number of letters which Guntrip wrote to me afterwards—certainly an aid to what he often called "postanalytic improvement."

When I first saw Harry Guntrip in 1964, he was still, at the age of 62, dealing with his own psychological problems, despite his having gained by then an international reputation, both as therapist and as a writer and theoretician. This reputation was later to grow with the inclusion of another major book (Guntrip, 1968), as well as a slighter volume (Guntrip, 1971), and flowered with invitations to lecture at major psychoanalytic centres in Britain and in the United States. At that time, after just over 1,000 hours of analysis with Fairbairn, Guntrip was still troubled by periodic exhaustion-illnesses which were quite debilitating. These illnesses were invariably triggered off by the death or departure of a close friend and seemed to be connected with the severe trauma, at the age of three and one half, over the death of Guntrip's younger brother, for which he had had total amnesia. It was due partly to these troublesome symptoms that Guntrip developed such penetrating insights into the "schizoid" problem—that condition in which the core of the self is cut off from personal relations and gives rise to conscious feelings of unreality and fatigue.

It was certainly true that Guntrip had developed, to a remarkable degree, conventional means of dealing with such problems by forced mental activity. His intellectual energy was formidable, and his general restlessness was something of a problem to me in the early stages of my therapy, when he fidgeted and interrupted constantly,