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Torsti is an author who has taken other paths to those of many of her colleagues in her home country, Finland. She covers areas that are both topical and complex. In this book, the author presents groundbreaking theoretical frameworks, presenting an interesting approach to the way in which the child, with his kinaesthetic capacities, creates his first potential space. She develops these ideas further, to describe the beginning of the symbolisation process, and couples together alertness and obstruction in free association.
Torsti has also achieved recognition beyond the borders of Finland. Her scientific work has been published in the Scandinavian Scientific Review, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. The present book consists of a number of papers and presentations collected from 1988 to the present.
In this book we learn from her experience of diverse areas within psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Among other topics, Torsti tackles problems in the treatment of borderline disturbances, psychosomatic disorders and trauma, motherhood and the feminine self. This takes us gradually forward to the central chapter on the beginning of the symbolisation process.
The author is also deeply engaged with questions that impact on the essence of psychoanalysis. In a number of different articles, she returns to the concern that something important to the core of psychoanalysis is on the verge of becoming lost. Here she is following in the footsteps of Andre Green when she proposes that the ego-psychology approach and object-relations theory, with their emphasis on preconscious processes in the transference and linear models of development, tend to dominate the mind of the analyst at the cost of an understanding of the unconscious. The tools of psychoanalysis are