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Harold Stewart is an eminent psychoanalyst and leading member of the Independent Group in the British Psychoanalytical Society. Those who have experienced him personally have appreciated his sharp intellect, clinical perceptiveness and forceful and yet unassuming personal style. He has over the years profoundly influenced the analytic work of many members of the Swedish Society for Holistic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Theoretically and clinically he has for over a decade contributed significantly to the development of our society. His open-mindedness concerning clinical and theoretical issues is reflected in the fact that although identified with the Independent tradition, he was the first psychoanalyst to introduce many members of our Society to the clinical usefulness of the theories and concepts of Melanie Klein and her followers. It is a pleasure to have his clinical and theoretical contributions to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis available in one volume.
As he remarks in his introduction, a pattern can be discerned in his articles written during a period of over thirty years. Many central psychoanalytical issues are discussed and the reader will find original contributions to the dynamics of the hypnotic state, the dream experience and transference, collusion in intimate relationships (among them the analytical one), changes in inner space, an experimental approach to thinking, regressive states and management, interpretation and other agents of psychic change.
In his book Stewart focuses on the agents of change as opposed to the agents of stagnation. One of the many rewarding aspects of the book is the opportunity it offers to follow the sensitive mind of an analyst who gradually discovers, together with his patient, minute changes in the patient's experience of himself, his internal world and his world of objects. This experience Stewart then turns into theory, always being careful to present the clinical data on which he bases his theoretical a