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JEREMY HAZELL HAS WRITTEN what will likely be the definitive study of the life and work of Harry Guntrip. The heart of this compelling book is the distillation of Guntrip’s voluminous journals, including dreams and dream analyses recorded over a forty-year period, plus detailed postmeeting recordings of hundreds of analytic sessions with W. R. D. Fairbairn and D. W. Winnicott. In reporting these transactions, Guntrip focuses on, and Hazell emphasizes, the efforts to wrest new meanings from what transpires in the analytic encounters.
No other psychoanalyst has so exposed his suffering and struggles as has Harry Guntrip in his driving quest for self-knowledge and healing, and his secondary aim to extend clinically relevant psychoanalytic theory.
Organizing this copious material into an engrossing psychological odyssey was a labor of love. Hazell, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Cardiff, Wales, had had a five-year training analysis with Guntrip and later became an intimate friend. In 1994, Hazell published Personal Relations Therapy: The Collected Papers of H. J. S. Guntrip, a book that brought together Guntrip’s many contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Guntrip is best known for his clinical studies of schizoid individuals and for his extensions to Fairbairn’s theory of the endopsychic world. In 1968, when I read Guntrip’s book Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, it was his lucid phenomenology of the schizoid experience and his differentiation of the schizoid state from the dynamics of depression that most captured my interest and influenced my clinical approach.
As an example of passages I marked then, Guntrip wrote about the schizoid individual’s resistance to analysis. He said it was due, in part, to “the fear of humiliation over disclosing weakness, and deepest of all the sheer fear of collapse into a self which is too weak and fear-ridden to face living. He is always to some extent resisting any real dependence