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Peter Lomas's new book, Cultivating Intuition, carries on in a tradition he has already established for himself in his previous writings, such as True and False Experience and The Case for a Personal Psychotherapy. The subtitle of the volume under review is significant: Lomas gives the impression that there is, in the mildest possible way, something polemical about his works, as if he is always introducing psychotherapy, to audiences who need convincing that there is something in it, and that that something does not include some unattainable mystique. ‘Demystifying’ is one of the words that come to mind to describe his work. Without being obvious about it, he produces ‘how to’ books; his method is to give us pictures of himself at work, with particular attention paid to minutiae of style, especially in the language used. Nooks and crannies of a day in the consulting-room are explored in his idiosyncratic way, and without didacticism, he conveys details of his technique and his ways of thinking about what he is doing, or about to do, as well as vignettes of him doing it and the patient responding. This gives us the opportunity to compare and contrast ourselves at work and to react to his signposts.
Although it does not say so in the brief biographical blurb—and I think it should—Lomas is no longer a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and has not been for many years. With an organisation as hard to get into as this one, it is more interesting to know why people choose to leave than that they were admitted in the first place, which would have been to be trained as psychoanalysts. We may make some informed guesses when we have built up his self-portrait; perhaps an independence of spirit which reacted against not only the authoritarian teaching of some senior analysts, but also a liking for solitude, or at the most one-to-one encounters, and an inability to make positive use of the group structure in the Society, especially as this structure tends to engende