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This is an extraordinarily difficult book to read through, but worth the effort. Had I started Irving Steingart's A Thing Apart: Love and Reality in the Therapeutic Relationship by skipping the first one hundred or so pages, I might have obtained more of its sweet rewards earlier. The reader will especially welcome Steingart's ideas about working with patients whose conflicts are revealed in behavioural enactments rather than in analytic verbalisations. Steingart contributes to our conceptualising and handling of enactments, so as to embrace these as a felt part of meaningful experiences in a treatment relationship.
The first chapter of this book is devoted to the place of psychoanalysis among knowledgeseeking pursuits, i.e. whether it is hermeneutic or scientific. Steingart argues for the latter. Unfortunately, his stylistic density makes it hard to follow his complex thinking. In Chapter Two, he compares three types of psychoanalytic practice, a Freudian practice that verbalises interpretively within the analysand's psychic reality, a practice that emphasises the analysand's here-and-now experience, and a practice in which the analyst expresses the countertransference. Again, I felt buffeted in the thick stew of Steingart's Talmudic debates with other writers, so laced with quotations and references that his direction was unclear. A clinical vignette and some brief comments about language encouraged my persistence. When I returned later to these first two ponderous chapters, I could then discern Steingart's purpose in emphasising the realist-correspondence view of psychoanalysis. His argument that the psychic reality of the patient exists independently serves as a groundwork for conceptualising the treatment relationship as one of real and unique love, and for describing how an analyst can utilise countertransference as well as individual work-style to elaborate collaboratively and resolve a patient's transferences.
Steingart finds his own voice and requires less do