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This volume of Harold Stewart's collected papers presents the reader with a clear picture of the author's development as a thinker and clinician. The book is unusual in the extent to which the reader can follow the growth of ideas from their origin in clinical experience in a very direct way. The papers collected here were published between 1961, when Stewart was still a student analyst, and 1990, by which time he had long been a senior member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
The book reflects the author's background and his practical approach. Stewart was a family doctor who became interested in hypnotherapy as a treatment for emotional problems. He had witnessed abreactive procedures in hospital psychiatry and was impressed by an article in the British Medical Journal by A. A. Mason, who used hypnotic suggestion to cure a rare skin disease. Both Mason and Stewart became psychoanalysts through their recognition of the limitations of hypnotherapy. A paper Stewart wrote on aspects of hypnotherapy, 'Collusion and the hypnotic state' forms the first chapter of this book. It tells us a great deal about the base from which Stewart's later ideas have developed. His experience using hypnosis gave him a vivid understanding of the splitting of transference feelings that occurs in the patient's relationship with the hypnotherapist.
It was his recognition of the denied negative transference in apparently successful cases that led him to become a psychoanalyst: 'The hypnotic state represents a collusive manic denial of an omnipotent, controlling, hostile attack on the hypnotist, together with the denial of anxieties of retaliation and guilt associated with it. This is a form of the manic defence, albeit in a two person situation'. This was neatly illustrated by a patient who was asked by Stewart, on emerging from trance, to describe his feelings about the hypnotist. He said 'I thought you went deeper in hypnosis—that you were in control if the hypnotist'. He