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Analysts hear much these days about how diversity in the field is going to revolutionise our theory and practice. Many of us have listened before to warnings about the tsunamis which follow opening the floodgates to training, and we're sceptical. But for those who still fret, the classicism of this slim volume will be a comfort.
This the first monograph from the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and the idea for the project emerged when 'in an informal exchange on a series of dreams between two IPTAR colleagues' (p. ix). Daisy Franco was able to predict the onset of pretermination on the basis of one of the dreams … from a series' (pp. 1-2). The authors' approach is unabashedly structural in orientation and candidly slanted towards practice and teaching.
Striving for currency and completeness in reviewing the literature, the authors use Firestein's summary (Termination of psychoanalysis of adults: a review of the literature. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 20: 873-895, 1974) as a starting point and stay focused on how dreams predict pretermination. On the whole, the effort is admirably restrained.
The process note samples in Chapter 2 are an attractive blend of clinical dialogue, the analyst's bracketed conjectures and the imaginative titling of the dreams, e.g. 'The lion is a pussycat', and 'My sideburns were cut off right below the ear'. Though the analyst's interpretations are deliberately cropped in this first pass through the dreams, there are few theoretical notions more recent than 1955.
Many of the interpretations are as notable for their omissions as for their catapulting inference. Dream 16, for example, reveals to the analyst 'John's identification with the introject … an attempt to ward off feeling like an inadequate child in the presence of his overpowering father' (pp. 51-2). But the (to me) homosexual implications of 'his frequently referred to memory of sitting on his Dad's shoulders and watching him urinate' (pp. 51-2) go unment