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Bjørn Killingmo, Professor Emeritus in Clinical Psychology and former director of the Clinic for Dynamic Psychotherapy, Institute of Psychology,
University of Oslo and his successor Siri E. Gullestad, Professor in Clinical Psychology, are both well known to the Nordic reader. In this book they demonstrate how they continue the Norwegian ‘Schjederup-tradition’, where structure and form are given priority in the description of psychoanalytic processes, as formulated by another Norwegian psychoanalyst Simonsen:
Erlebnis wird Erfahrung/Erfahrung ist form/Die Form trägt in sich selbst den bericht ihrer Enstehung.
The title of the book Underteksten [The Subtext] is chosen as a metaphor for the tension between the repressed and the return of the repressed. The main intention with the book is consequently to use this perspective when describing clinical practice. The book is about the emotions, fantasies, wishes and self-images that are too vulnerable to be spoken out loud in the analysis and which the analyst consequently experiences through the intonation of the words, the body language and the relation to the patient. The second part of the title, Psychoanalytic Therapy in Practice, is chosen with reference to Kernberg and to the basic understanding of psychoanalytic technique as characterized by interpretation, transference analysis and technical neutrality.
The authors’ aim is “through clinical examples to illustrate what the therapist is thinking in the clinical situation - how he behaves there and then - and why he thinks and behaves as he does” (p. 15). This aim is fully achieved. At the same time they keep an open-minded, exploring and curious tone when they describe the classical thinking and in developing and arguing for their own points of view.
Psychoanalytic therapy in practice is what the book is about. It is divided into three parts with an introduction and an epilogue. After the Introduction which argues why psychoanalytic therapy has a place in the