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Ensconced behind the barricade of Freud's canon, psychoanalysis has been slow to embrace challenges from within and without. The internal challenges have come in the form of attempts either to question or extend Freud's ideas. Despite the fact that analysts whose contributions fell outside the canon were treated as heretics rather than as participants in a scientific discourse, brave analysts have occasionally emerged to challenge our diffident field with new ideas. Morton Shane, Estelle Shane and Mary Gales are three such courageous analysts and their book, Intimate Attachments: Toward a New Self Psychology, clearly and directly challenges basic psychoanalytic assumptions.
The book opens with the analysis of a traumatised woman for whom no sign of transference, which they define as the re-enactment with the analyst of old conflicted and traumatic experiences, emerges. Instead, the authors assert that the woman's analytic experience is marked by a never before known feeling of safety. They challenge the reader with the nagging question of whether this really can be an analysis when so little transference is evident and so much that is new and positive is experienced. Gales and the Shanes answer this provocative question in the first chapter, which then serves as a guide to the new self-psychology they elaborate in the first half of their book; abundant clinical material spanning the life cycle fills the second half.
Intimate Attachments is an iconoclastic work. With origins in Bowlby's attachment theory and in some aspects of Kohut's work, the authors' new theory challenges classical psychoanalytic ideas and Kohut's original psychology of the self as well by de-emphasising the notion of psychoanalytic cure effected by an interpretive process. Instead they advance the concept of analytic cure effected by the provision of a missing essential relationship, a subject of current debate within the field of self-psychology (Siegel, 1999).
In this review, I summarise the major