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With The Authority of Tenderness, Paul Williams (2022, 2010, 2013) provides the third volume of his trilogy that began with The Fifth Principle and was followed by Scum, and it is an emotionally powerful addition to the trilogy. All three books contain, in part, a description of the traumatic experience of a child and adolescent who suffered extensive emotional deprivation and abuse by his parents. All these works combine both fiction and autobiography, which are most of the time challenging to distinguish. In this series, Williams offers an in-depth understanding of the potentially devastating impact of early childhood trauma. Leaning heavily on Winnicottian ideas of holding and surviving the destruction of objects, Williams writes eloquently about clinical sequelae and reveals an analytic stance that he suggests is essential for the treatment of childhood traumatogenic disturbances of the self.
As was the case in the two previous volumes, The Authority of Tenderness is narrated by a psychoanalyst. The analyst’s personal life tends to recede in importance in his most recent book, since Williams is concerned with the lives of adult patients who have experienced some form of shattering of the true self, which is revealed in the manner in which they are dominated by alternating feelings of terror, persecution, rage, shame, guilt, or a sense of deadness.
Trained as a psychoanalyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society, Williams not only worked clinically but also was an editor and co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He wrote a significant number of traditionally constructed articles and
books, some of which deal, in part, with the experiences described in the three volumes of his fictional memoir. According to Williams, it was his own analysis along with his reading not only the work of Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Bion but also the literary work of such figures as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that were major factors that prompted him to turn t