You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I have always thought of James T. McLaughlin as a gentle radical. It was not that he preached an ideology or sought to establish a dissident school. His way was simply to tend his garden or his woodworking shop, those mind-freeing activities that gave him the quietude for contemplating his daily experiences with patients and for exploring more fully what he came to call ‘the interplay of dyadic transferences.’
This habit of self-analytic reflection, with attention to his mistakes and his own role in clinical impasses, allowed McLaughlin to become a more engaged analyst. From that perspective, then, he began to write about these experiences with uncommon candor and to question the mid-century orthodoxy of the objective, all-knowing analyst he had been trained to be. Earlier than most, he embraced the notion that the analytic encounter involves two people in all of their affectively laden transferences.
My first encounter with his work was in McLaughlin (1973), which made the case for the non-reporting training analyst, a position that was being adopted by some institutes, but not all. Today, it seems so self-evidently destructive to the analytic process for a training analyst to have any influence on institute decisions about his analysand that we tend to forget that it was ever otherwise. And yet the J Am Psychoanal Assoc editors felt obliged to balance McLaughlin's argument with another article that defended the reporting policy (Calef and Weinshiel, 1973).
McLaughlin (1973) antedates by nearly a decade the earliest paper in this collection; but it shows how his concern with the analyst's influence on the delicate fabric of the analytic encounter led him to challenge established views. Always a bit ahead of the curve in changing clinical opinion, McLaughlin's prescient principles have now been tested by time and experience.
This book collects six of McLaughlin's more influential papers, published between 1981 and 1996, which are contextualized and explicated by an equa