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It is twenty years since Harry Guntrip died. His most creative time was in the nineteen fifties and sixties. He has, I think, a definite place in psychoanalytic history as Fairbairn's most vigorous and readable exponent. In his own right he can be counted as one of the founders of systematic object-relations thinking. His ideas about the nature of schizoid structures have had a lasting impact. His style, beautifully illustrated by a host of clinical vignettes, is pungently lucid. Quite a few professionals have mentioned that it was reading Guntrip that brought them to psychoanalysis. This is all the more remarkable as Guntrip was a nonconformist minister who worked in Leeds far from any centre of psychoanalytic thought. Despite not having had any formal therapeutic training he had an average of twelve patients a day for many years.
It is Guntrip's books that are best known; but this complete collection of papers will be useful not only to the historical scholar but also to the general reader, who will be able to get a clear introduction to his ideas by just dipping into some of the chapters here.
Guntrip's early papers developed Fairbairn's fundamental reformation of the classical instinct model into a thoroughgoing psychoanalytic object-relations theory. Next comes the main fruit Guntrip obtains from this vision—the exposition of schizoid mechanisms. This is followed by papers where Winnicott takes over from Fairbairn as Guntrip's main influence; here we have a centring upon therapeutic technique, especially upon the fear of and the need for regression in the therapy. Then, coming from Guntrip's last years, is a miscellany of essays of a philosophical rather than a technical nature. How does he appear now thirty and forty years later as we come towards the end of the century?
I remember hearing Guntrip speak thirty years ago and my reaction to him was quite complex. Frankly, there was something unlikeable about him; this was a note of a sermonising preacher in his ton